Easter Eggs In Popular Websites
An Easter Egg is any hidden ‘little surprise’ in a popular form of media that isn’t immediately obvious. This could be a bit of extra story at the end of a film, it could be a hidden reference to another story in a book or a computer game, or it could be the artist’s signature hidden on a canvas where nobody would easily see it.
Those are just some popular examples of Easter eggs, but there are actually many others you can come across if you are willing to look – and on the net there are hundreds. These Easter Eggs are examples of website developers having a little bit of fun with themselves and letting the audience in on a private joke. But what Easter Eggs also are, is an example of brilliant marketing. Why’s that? Because when you discover something hidden, you’ll be compared to share it with others in order to demonstrate your cunning and your superior knowledge, and in order to share an experience that others aren’t likely to have had on their own.
If you want to enhance your own website then, an Easter Egg may just be the thing you need and just the way to win your visitors over a little better. Read on for some of the best examples of Easter Eggs that may be able to serve as your inspiration…
Digg.Com
If you head over to Digg and press the keys ‘up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, b, a’ on your keyboard (which retro gamers may recognize as the ‘Konami code’), then you’ll get to hear some music playing; A nice little reference to classic memories of many gamers, and an amusing thing to try out. See? I bet you’re going there right now!
Google Maps
Google have always been fans of Easter Eggs and gags and they’ve long recogniszed the marketing power that they can hold too (which is why their famous Google Doodles are so popular on the homepage). One of the best-known of their hidden jokes though comes when you search for directions to Mordor on Maps, which will show the warning ‘One does not simply walk into Mordor’.
Vogue.Com
Go to Vogue.Com and use that Konami code on your keyboard, and you’ll be shown some fashion Dinosaurs… literally… Yeah it’s weird…
Buzzfeed
It’s that Konami code again! Try it on Buzzfeed and you’ll be greeted by a terrifying vision of the future of entertainment that will leave you scarred and scared for humanity… unless you’re a teenage girl…
YouTube
It used to be that heading to YouTube and pressing up+left while videos buffered would let you play the classic game ‘Snake’. That’s gone, but what we now have in its place is a retro game of missiles. To play it, click to the right of any video and then type ‘1980’ on your number pad.
Everyone knows that you can set ‘Pirate’ as the language for Facebook should you wish, but what not everyone knows is that you can also set the language to be ‘English (Upside Down)’. Which is not very useful, but it’s certainly interesting…
Sky Bet
Sky Bet is a gambling site. Gambling is a vice. Thus you may not want people to know that you’re gambling when they accidentally barge in on you or look over your shoulder at work. Fortunately if you click a tiny icon hidden just above the Facebook share button, you can quickly hide the whole site with a fake set of charts and graphs to make it look like you’re actually working. My favourite is ‘Things Meatloaf Would do for Love’ as a pie chart – the options being ‘Anything’ and ‘That’.
It seems only fair to end on another one from Google seeing as they make so many. Head over to the main search page this time and try typing ‘do a barrel roll’ to see the entire page spin around 360 degrees.
These are just a few different Easter Eggs you can find around the net, so get searching! And if you’ve just paid for your own server space, then why not consider adding a little Easter Egg into that site? It’s fun for your visitors and great for getting your site noticed!
John Samuel, the author of this article, is an employee at Net Depot, providers and specialists in dedicated hosting servers. John loves woodworking and practices making his own furniture on weekends.
