There have always been competitions over the best 404/500 pages (the pages you arrive at when the website breaks or you hit a link that doesn’t exist). This is because people arriving on these pages are generally not going to be happy chappies, because they expected to go somewhere and instead landed nowhere.

So people got all creative and made cute, funky and downright funny pages that get their now happy visitors back on track.

But I’ve been thinking more about website personality. I LOVE it how Google changes their logo for different events. How cool is it when the normal Google page gives you a little surprise? It makes the average internet geek’s day.

I also saw a site recently that is dedicated to ‘beer o’clock’ and was thinking it would be kind of funny if on fridays everyone replaced their website with that uber disgraceful animated gif, scrolling fluro text filled page as they knocked off for beer… Even if it was just for an hour.

It would make me laugh, and probably lead to the entire Decisive Flow office winding up on your doorstep.

I like all the websites that put up fake sites on April Fools day. Not only are they a crackup, they go viral like nothing else (don’t you love it how I’m giving all these examples but not bothering to search for links to them?)… And viral marketing is a gazillion times better than anything else. ever.

It just struck me when Technorati threw me a cute error page about 2 minutes ago, that these website ‘quirks’ are just so cool. We should take more advantage of the fact the web is a bug ridden place and allows for people to end up virtually anywhere - and give them something cool to look at when they do.

Ok back to ‘real work’ now.