Our Mission
You hold in your hand a device offering unlimited opportunities to make people’s work and home lives better. We use our process, creativity, and experience to do so every day in big and small ways.
We are a team of design and code nerds that create websites and web apps with delightful user experiences to make our clients more successful and productive. We build great web stuff.
Niche Studio Partners, Mikael and Nathan a.k.a ‘Incorrectly spelled Michael’ and ‘Nahtan’
The Niche Story
Mikael started Niche Studio in high school. He made money and plenty of mistakes geeking out on hand-coded HTML websites before CSS and PHP existed and doing graphic design when Illustrator 8, QuarkXpress 4 and a 100MB Zip disk were cutting-edge.
After studying Industrial Design at QUT, Mikael took Niche full-time instead of getting a real job. Nathan joined as employee number 4 on the back of some killer design skills in 2005. He stuck around and became a partner in 2009.
20 years later, our work focuses on user experience, websites, and web apps, with a little bit of branding because it is fun. We make web stuff that is accessible for clients and empowers them to take ownership.
We have been honoured to work with clients across diverse industries and recognised with industry awards. We are proud to have supported many non-profits and startups and continue to be passionate about making great web stuff every day.
Join our cult…ture
Do you have what it takes to fill this chair? Have a look at our open roles. Regardless, we are always looking for great people. I heard you are great people. No matter where you are at in your career, we are happy to have a chat. Get in touch.
PS — Your seat can be at home if that’s more your thing.
Working at Niche
A wonderful bunch of beautiful nerds. At heart, Niche is just a group of nerds who like to talk about nerd things but get paid at the same time.
We value our team, clients, and users. We believe in embracing differences and giving our team the ability to do their best work while feeling supported and included. By learning from each team member’s unique interests, experience, and expertise, we all grow.
We must live our values and collaborate with like-minded clients on projects we believe in and can be insanely proud of.
With a great team, we can build great web stuff.
Niche really values the contribution, ideas, and experiences of each team member to make our work better. Plus, interesting trivia and dad jokes are shared generously.
One of those is a good thing.
Digital Producer and keeper of the schedule, Melissa
a.k.a ‘Mel’ or ‘Mello’ or ‘Melificient’
Your Benefits
🛖 Work from anywhere
Want to work from home? Go for it. Want to come to the office? Sure thing! Wherever you are, just be on Google Meet for stand-up at 10am.
📆 Choose your hours
Full-time, part-time, casual. We want to work with great people and can adjust your role and workload to fit your life (and its changes).
💻 Choose your tools
Work the way you feel most comfortable. Usually, that is an M1 MacBook Pro and an Aeron chair, but choose the OS, hardware, and software that works for you.
☕️ Coffee is free
If there is none, raise the alarms. Not down with morning brown? That’s cool too.
Your Health
😮💨 We don’t do crunch
We also don’t expect overtime. We scope accurately and manage our schedule and client expectations.
🍹 Work-life balance for life
Work stays at work, and you can be sure to switch off and know your boundaries are respected.
🩺 We value your health
Mental and physical wellness should never be taken for granted. A project will always have a Plan B, but your health should never be de-prioritised.
😷 Holidays, sick leave, appointments, movie premieres
If it’s important to you, the time is there to take. Just be open about it so we can manage expectations.
Niche Studio gives me the opportunity to do everything I want and more. Work closely with other developers, continue to learn and improve, gently roast others in the team any chance I get… Sometimes I will return my gratitude with cookies.
Soon to be the Best Developer, ever, Jessica
a.k.a ‘Jesso’ or ‘The Boss’ or ‘She who can’t be named’
The Process
🦾 Work smart
We don’t do email. We Slack and Crisp. We don’t take calls. We 3CX and Meet. We love Trello, Notion, Everhour, Figma and Pastel. We dev with Git, VSCode and Ansible. We look for the best tools to collaborate seamlessly from anywhere.
🦤 Evolve
We want to be better. Our processes, tech, and solutions are all an ongoing team collaboration. We are always open to your ideas.
🦸♀️ Be empowered
Our devs and designers collaborate to lead scopes and solution definition. We do planning poker and empower our team to solve problems together to make our work better.
📊 Transparency
Our business is your business. We collaborate and openly share our business goals and progress so we can all shape our future.
The Culture
🤓 Nerd pride
We all have our obsessions. Be you. We don’t judge unless it’s code or design. Worried you are not enough of a nerd? That is cool too. We’ll still like you.
🌏 Do the right thing
We want all team members to make ethical choices, be transparent, and accountable. Do right by our team, clients, and users.
👍 Great clients
Our clients are also team members. We work with clients that we like and fit our values. Life is too short just to do things for the money.
💖 Love your work
Web stuff is not a job for us. It is a passion. If you care about what you do, we want to work with you!
They’ve always supported my side hustles; musician, actor, model, film producer, activist, support worker and fashion designer, on and off the field.
Digital Strategist and client whisperer, Indy
a.k.a ‘Indiana Bones’ or ‘Mr Bad’
Our Technology
We build great web stuff that empowers and delights. We use best practices and processes, find the best technology fit, and create long-term success for our clients.
We ❤️ WordPress
We use WordPress because it offers an exceptional user experience, a vast ecosystem of plugins, and developers and ensures our clients own the code for their sites.
We 💔 bad plugins
Being the most popular content management system, WordPress has countless bad plugins, themes, and sites. We use our experience and skill to build sites the right way, with quality plugins and code.
We 🌱 Roots
We use the Roots WordPress Stack. It brings 12-factor app development to WordPress. Roots includes Sage, a theme framework, Bedrock, a WordPress structure for source control, and plugin/package management via Composer and Trellis, giving automated development and production servers using Ansible.
🦖 Never fear the new stuff
We use WordPress right now, but we must look further. We are here to evolve and improve while maintaining our values. We can let the past die, but we must also skip the flavour of the month.
Our Product
Our clients and users is the reason we build.
🧑💻 Users first
Happy users lead to successful products. We make tools to make users’ lives better. Our work must consider the user’s journey and perspectives. We are the user’s voice.
🚀 Empower clients
We let clients manage as much of their content as possible. By building flexible sites with reliable content management experiences and automation, we give our clients the tools to succeed.
☎️ Awesome support
Great products need less support. We design out frustration and strive for fast, friendly support that adds value. We are there for clients when they need us.
⚙️ Managed Hosting
We host the sites we make to maintain their quality, performance, and security. It makes them easier to support and improve and means that the buck stops with us.
For me it’s the work life balance, the genuine appreciation of my efforts and being allowed to take the time to fully investigate and understand a task so that I can produce a result that I am proud of.
Developer and an all-round top lad, Michael
a.k.a ‘Stretch’ or ‘Correctly spelled Michael’
Lessons Learnt
We must remember the lessons that only come with experience.
🤮 No pre-built templates
Using a template means a site hasn’t been thought through properly. We start with the brief and requirements, consider the users, and then wireframe and design with actual content.
💸 Own, don’t rent
Using software-as-a-service must be considered carefully, notably when clients can’t easily replace them. Our clients must own the tools we build.
We 💀 technical debt
We have seen too many projects get into trouble because they add features and custom code that clients can’t affordably maintain. Our tech decisions must consider the future. Choose well-maintained plugins and code.
❄️ Beware the snowflakes
Sites with unique code and functions are harder to maintain. They are a future risk for updates and maintenance. Sharing code and plugins across projects benefit everyone.
📓 Docs or it didn’t happen
Knowledge dies when forgotten. Creating great documentation helps our team, clients, and future selves to understand, maintain, and improve our work.
Tech Values
How we build is as important as what we build.
🪤 Never bank on bad ideas
We treat every project like our own, make it cost-effective, and look for a return on investment. We prove the need and recommend what we think is best, not just do what is asked.
🦹♂️ Do no evil
We are champions of privacy, security, and accessibility. Collect just the needed data and consider the motives of third parties.
🗿 Stand on the shoulders of giants
We use open-source. We look outside and find the best libraries, services, and ideas. Contribute back to the open-source community.
🙌 Don’t compete. Collaborate!
There are no egos at Niche. Learn from clients and create partnerships with suppliers. Share our secrets.
Join us. It is the only way.
Being heard is only the beginning. You can easily manipulate them to do anything, like buy everyone red tracksuits.
Account Manager and massive nerd, because he is very tall, Alex a.k.a ‘Big Red’ or ‘Clifford’ or ‘Burl’