As the lines blur between Web Design, CRO, SEO, UX, UI, Content, and other disciplines there’s one thing that’s central to them all. Your website.
We all know that on site activities like reducing bounce rates and increasing time on site as well as off site factors like social sharing and links are all important if not crucial to your online success.
There’s so many opportunities to help encourage all of them, sometimes with very little effort, that I wanted to demonstrate some ways you can immediately benefit your site without having to rebuild or redesign it.
By making your site ‘interesting’ you make it (more) linkworthy. I’ve tried as much as possible to stay away from ‘content’ suggestions though naturally some thing overlap with content to an extent.
If you think of any other great examples then please add them to the comments to help everyone else!
Utilise Typically Boring Site Pages
People pages
Liven up your people page with unique insights into each staff member. Jellyfish do something similar in a fun and quirky way using cartoon overlays on rollover. It becomes quite addictive to see what each one will do which engages the user and increases time on site. Also fun to share.
Distilled do something along the same lines but with alternative quirky photos.
Privacy and Terms & Conditions pages
This opinionated lawyer has a unique privacy page. Yours doesn’t have to be controversial but you could easily inject some personality into it with images and build trust by abandoning all the legal jargon and using honest, reassuring promises in plain language for your users.
404 pages
The NME site is currently featuring Dave Grohl on their 404 page and I’ve seen a few people Tweet the link. We can’t all feature celebrities but you could promote a featured product, team member, recent project or company values with your dead space.
Or why not engage your users instead of sending them back to the site with an interactive game on your 404 page like this site did with a variation on the classic game Lemmings.
About Us pages
37 signals does a nice job on their about us page combining a visual timeline of the company history, their milestones and achievements, it gets the key people and products mentioned and portrays the company personality all in one go.
Recruitment pages
Stand out against all the other companies wanting to hire the best and also make the page more shareable by being different and interesting. This page on the Inflection site is both compelling and visually appealing.
Contact pages
Give your contact page a unique twist. On the Fixel site you can swap the faces of the designers with that of a giraffe. Weird but fun and addictive. If you scroll down, the designers are then represented with silhouetted facial hair along with their contact details.
Custom footers
Normally footers have the usual boring copyright and legal information and some useful site links. Why not reward a users who’s bothered to scroll right through your page with a tangible benefit like an offer or just with something fun and unexpected like this illustrated footer on Urban Pies.
E-Commerce Examples
Crazy or Excessive Products
Firebox, the gadget gift site, do this very well with a ‘WTF?!’ product category featuring Flying Hovercrafts, a Replica Batmobile, Jetpacks, an Electric DeLorean and the World’s Most Expensive Vacuum Cleaner amongst others.
Fake products
This example on Wish.co.uk of a 10 Downing Street experience day sprang to mind. Fake products have been done before, and will be done again, and when done well always attract attention. Note the FB and Twitter shares on the page are sitting at around 700 and 500 respectively.
Controversial Checkout Process
Last year, Kogan, an Australian online electronics dealer, began imposing a “tax” on customers visiting its site using Internet Explorer 7. The news page got thousands and thousands of Likes and Tweets and featured on news sites like the BBC.
Demo your products in a silly but useful way
Millican is a quirky site selling bags & travel accessories. Rather than just show you mages of bag they demo them in an almost silly but very useful way by filming them being packed with ridiculous amounts of stuff.
Interesting models
Why not use interesting, controversial or unique models in your photo shoots. Tattoos aren’t exactly controversial anymore but Need Supply often use tattooed models for product shots.
Forget you’re a shop!
Slam City is a skateboard shop, but they sponsor a bunch of skateboarders, do a ton of interviews, videos, etc. & they don’t do that for links or shares, they do it because they think it’s good. They probably get a lot of links/shares as a side-effect. Genius.
Customer product shot contributions
Black Milk achieve this beautifully by letting customers add photos of them wearing a product on Facebook accompanied by a specific hashtag. The submissions are then pulled into a gallery on the product page like below on the Artoo 2.0 dress.
Useful gamification
Allow users to play with or ‘try on’ your products by gamifying the process. H&M have a virtual dressing room that lets you choose your character, dress them up and then buy or share the results.
3D product creation
Enabling users to create their own products then view them in 3D is fun and engaging and whether or not they end up buying the product it just begs to be shared socially. This process is optimised by Foldable.me.
Let users test drive products
Some things are fun and easy to buy online and others not so much. Then again some people hate buying glasses in store too. Specsavers lets you virtually try on any glasses by simply uploading a photo then choosing frames and colours to see how they’ll look.
Company Transparency
Warts and all
How about letting everyone see right inside your company’s inner workings. It’s simple yet very effective to do what Huit Denim did and have a live webcam of your factory and processes for all to see.
Publicise bugs and complaints
Instead of trying to cover up customer problems how about make them all public like Naked Wines do. Not only will other customers see you help but it builds trust very quickly with potential customers.
Let your customers see you during interactions
Schuh, the footwear site, have a live support chat that let’s you see the support agent you are dealing with on a webcam. They can’t see you so it’s not an intrusive service but it’s a nice reminder it’s an actual person helping you.
Be personal
Freeagent, the online accounting software, have an amazing support team. We use Freeagent so I’ve experienced them a few times. I love that on their support page it shows you the members of the support team and their names. Nice and personable. Stock photos worked in 1996. Nowadays, not so much. How many companies can that 1 girl with the headset work for and who really has a globe in their office to point at?
Be the real, authentic, you
Love this site. You might have seen Ling on Dragon’s Den with her car leasing business. Her personality and marketing were eccentric and different but instead of trying to hide that away or change them to fit a persona the site just played on it and embraces her completely. Don’t try to fake it, people will know when you are being yourself.
Include your pets
Lots of companies have dogs that come to the office with workers or satellite staff might spend all day with their companions. People love animals so feature them on your site and let your audience get to know them. Web agency Nclud include their pets on their people page like loveable Floyd Günther below.
Do it live
Annoyingly I couldn’t find the example I wanted to use. There used to be a stunt kite maker who you could watch building your custom kite on Ustream. That was very cool. Tattoo sites could use this to great effect too. I could imagine a lot of outgoing people telling their friends they could watch them being tattooed and giving out the link then screenshots and the url flying around Twitter and Facebook all day.
Geek Section
Have fun withyour source code
Lots of companies have used ASCII fun in their website’s source code to great effect. Coca-Cola, Obama and Tumblr all had ASCII versions of their logos in their source code recently generating lots of links and mentions.
Easter Eggs
Die hard fans of your brand and geeks will love this and it will generate a lot of chatter. Dante’s Inferno hid ASCII art on lots of popular website to generate a buzz around the game.
Topical Elements
You could adapt elements of your site based on the date, season or important event relevant to your market. Probably the best known version of this would be Google adapting it’s logo to a Google Doodle to mark important dates. Every time they use an interactive one I see it talked about all day on Twitter.
Games within your site
You could have a treasure hunt within your site, or in Heart Internet’s case, a Zombie Hunt. Genius if you think about it. Fun. Increases page views and time on site. Have promo content on the pages you know they’ll have to see to progress. Capture email addresses to announce prizes. And ZOMBIES!
Konami Codes
The Konami Code, is a cheat code that appears in many Konami video games. Many website incorporate hidden content behind the code being entered. Google Reader makes some Ninjas appear. The sequence of the code which is most popularly used on websites is the following (directions are performed using arrow keys):
Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A
Robots txt file
Why not have some fun with your robots txt file like on http://explicitly.me/robots.txt it combines ASCII art, a story and humour to create a linkworthy geeky resource.
Beautiful typography
It’s easier than ever to break away from the limited range of traditional web fonts and include customer fonts on your site by using 3rd party services like Google Fonts. Barcamp uses fonts beautifully to help enhance the character of the design.
James Agate
Roger Green
Want to chat about your project or requirements? If you call now you can talk to me directly:
This is an awesome monster of a post.
So many good examples.
If only more site owners would start to brighten up their sites and make the would-be dull pages into something more interesting.
An issue I find is that too many site owners are scared to go slightly out of their comfort zone or worry about how their company or brand will be seen. In truth these type of improvements can only enhance a reputation. If only people would take (what they see as) a risk.
Yeah it’s a shame Andy especially when none of us (in SEO or web design) would consider most of the examples risqué or extreme – most are just common sense and bordering on best practise as the web matures. But like you I know of a few clients who would require a tailored pitch and still be worried about trying some of them out.
Wonderful examples in there Chris. I really applaud any company that abandons the headset girl cliché.
I’ll leave you with one ace example of a big company who “get it” with their about page: http://www.bloomberg.com/company
Awesome example Paul love it.
Great and interesting examples here Chris, you clearly spend far too much time on the internet!
A couple of more examples for you:
I really like Screaming Frog’s “Our story” page http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/our-story/
This site is just full of bonkers products:
http://www.thisiswhyimbroke.com/
2 great examples there nice one Gaz. Eat, Sleep, Live, Breathe the internet
Love these examples Chris. Love Schuh and the live chat feature – awesome for customer experience and I’d imagine, awesome for their conversion rates. Still love the Black Milk Clothing one too for the UGC, makes a page much more valuable and again, I can imagine a positive impact on conversions.
This was a really fun post! I love the fake product idea…still trying to convince my colleagues here that it’s a great idea. Also, the art in the code? Brilliant! I absolutely love that. Talk about geeked out! I can think of some really fun things in that area, like putting a message to your competitors in there, LOL. Thanks for this. I’m sending it around to everyone on my team now.
There’s lot of fake product pages floating around just show them the link/share count! Glad you enjoyed
Agreed @Dana, hard to convince a client too!
Great work Chris, well worth the time and research.
Some of the most interesting documentaries that I’ve ever watched and they were made by a footwear manufacturer!?! http://www.palladiumboots.co.uk/video
I’m not sure if they sold anymore shoes because of it but the videos got millions of views between them and a few links along the way. Probably an example for the bigger brands but still very cool.
Fantastic Post Mate!
I loved the creativity used by each one of them. Very sad to see not everyone use things like you shared. Definitely, to make dull pages into more shareable, playable & adorable must be the aim of every other website.
This is awesome! I especially love the #hashtags idea – I’d love to apply the idea to my websites, but not sure how i can do that in the gambling industry.
The only issue is that a lot of this stuff isn’t measuable. And that sadly does’t take precedence over work which is guranteed to perform when time is tight.
Dunno Micheal I reckon a lot of it is. You could see time on page before and after a change. You could measure links/likes/shares of a page. Measure conversion improvement from the changed pages. And so on. Sure it would take work to prove but doesn’t everything?
People love winning and sharing good fortune and excitement. I’m sure it would be very easy to encourage them to share their winning tickets or them collecting their winnings or even better send in pics of what they did with the winnings!
Hi Chris, cheers for the response. Yeah i guess you’re right in many respects, and there’s me thinking I’m open minded… psshhh…
Regarding the #hashtag idea I see where you’re going with it and i think it’s certainly something that could be done for say William Hill or Ladbrokes, but we are an affiliate (http://www.roulette.co.uk) and struggle in that area.
There’s certainly ways we can look to be more creative though even with our author pages and 404s as explained above. With definitely look to get these on the list of things to do! Thanks
Wow…simply wow. You have provided a mashup of some of the best website ideas. Glad to see people are playing with robots.txt files as well.
That’s an awesome inspiration gallery! Thanks
Great post, I especially like the 404 error page with the lemings. I am very inspired by all the great content and it just in time as I am looking to redesign my blog.
Thanks Jo. If you need any help with the new blog give us a shout
I have to say Chris, absolutely awesome post!
Thanks for putting all of these great sites together. I Just bookmarked it and have no doubt that I will be back here again and again.
Argh you were in the spam folder Ade just seen it. Thanks for stopping by!
thanks chris for this awesome collection , i love and select the best from above is “distilled” team!
Thanks Chris, Great examples of creativity at its best, loved the custom 404 pages and Team pic overlays from Distilled and Jellyfish.
Hi Chris,
Love your post – such a big eye opener with loads of great ideas. Am definitely going to bookmark it and read it over and over. I wonder what your fees are….
£10 each time you read it
I can’t wait to try some of this things and to think some new ones.
Great post!! As soon as I finished reading it, I shared it!! So basically it also worked out as en example of something linkworthy
I would’ve never thought of ASCII art in the source code… genius!
Great post
Thanks Chris, this has just sparked an influx of inspiration!
Great ideas! I love the “About us”/Team photo ideas. Definitely want to suggest these for our ecomm site!
What an epic post Chris. I was thinking about writing something like this for Paddy’s blog, but it certainly wouldn’t have been this good
I really appreciate the conversation about integrating more value into your website on what you would call your boring pages. It’s all about user experience and getting your customer what they need. It’s important to be creative and have a personality especially on content that could help you make the sale.
Great post!
Thanks for checking it out! I’m sure yours would have been epicer! [sic]
Chris,
Greetings from across the pond. Thanks for going to the trouble to locate and post these examples. As an e commerce site, we are constantly competing for attention…standing out from the crowd is a sure fire way to gain eyeballs, and your ideas/example will be added to the updates on which we are constantly working.
Team Vvego appreciates you.
Robert Porter
Founder&Friend
Vvego International
Thank you Chris, this post is a powerhouse of ideas.
Lots of great stuff here. Many great ideas and some very usable ones. I think I am going to start with “including my pets”. I have always put my dog out for conference calls for fear she would grunt or yelp (she does that while she sleeps). Not really worried about a disruptive bark, but a strange noise that I would have to explain to a client always worried me. I guess I need to be more human and less agency.
It is amazing how technical and beautiful the web has become with all the great and intriguing designs. Personally a favorite of mine is google.com/nexus/ leave it to Google to come up with such a slick design.
Great examples, Thank you!