Ideas for Websites I Haven’t Made

Over the last 12 years or so I’ve had many ideas for websites. Some of them have become real websites with proper visitors and everything, but some have never seen, and will probably never see, the light of day.

I’m not going to list my successful sites, as a few of my favourites are listed on the right of this blog under “My Other Sites.” If you’re interested, click away! This post is more about the ideas I’ve had for sites that I have never made and probably never will make. If you are interested in making any of these sites, please do. I’m sure they will be great fun! And please let me know if you make any of them, as I’d love to see them. At the time of writing this all the domain names I mention are still available in some form or another, (either the .com is still free or the .co.uk)

Why haven’t I made them myself I hear you ask? I currently own around 12 websites. 12 is enough. The ideas below would either take to long for me to create, or they would consume what is left of my spare time in maintaining them. Either that or I thought about them for so long I talked myself out of making them.

UnfunnyBunny

The idea behind UnfunnyBunny was to take photos of normal, everyday life. You could take a photo of someone working at a desk, or sat in a park, or driving a car. You need photo opportunities of typically mundane scenes. But, before taking a mundane photo, you would position a small toy rabbit somewhere in the shot.

The idea was to position a toy rabbit in everyday life situations, but have it looking at people. You’d take a photo of an everyday situation WITH the rabbit in the frame somewhere, with everyone just looking normal. Everyone in the photo would be doing what they would normally be doing and not acknowledging the rabbit in any way.

Visitors to the site would look at the photo, see that there was a rabbit in the photo and wonder why. Why was there a rabbit there? Why was no-one acknowledging there was a rabbit there?

It’d be funny, because it wasn’t funny.

ICommandYou

This was a challenge site, where visitors would come every day to see what that days challenge was. It would have had a big picture of a genie, or some sort of “in charge” character, with a speech bubble. Every day the text in the speech bubble would change, issuing a new challenge to visitors.

The challenges, all written in bold to give the impression of shouting a command, would all be prefixed with “TODAY I COMMAND YOU TO….” and included things like:

“PRONOUNCE A WORD INCORRECTLY ON PURPOSE, THEN SAY “THATS HOW THEY SAY IT IN WALES.” ”

“KEEP ONE OF YOUR ARMS IN THE AIR UNTIL SOMEONE ASKS YOU WHY, THEN DENY YOU DID IT.”

“RAISE THE PITCH OF THE FINAL WORD IN A FEW CONVERSATIONS, SO IT SOUNDS LIKE YOU’RE ASKING A QUESTION.”

I love the idea of an ephemeral site, but trying to find a script that allowed me to do what I wanted it to do took longer than a couple of hours, and so I lost interest.

BirthdayBeard

When blokes shave, they always test out different designs with their stubble. You might have a goatee for a minute or so, or cleanly shave the chin and have massive sideburns, before completing the shave, shaving the entire thing off and having a clean slate.

The idea was this. A week or two before your birthday, don’t shave. Build up as much stubble as you can up until your birthday. Think of it as preparing a canvas.

Then, on the day itself, craft a fine semi-permanent beard, take a photo of it and shave it all off. You will have made a beard that was ONLY there for a short time on your birthday.

Then, after getting dressed and stuff, share your photo via BirthdayBeard.

It occured to me that the main issue with this site is that birthdays are a once-a-year thing. If I got 5 members joining it, my site would only have 5 photos on it for at LEAST a year. I adapted my idea and came up with a new site name, BankHolidayBeard, as bank holidays are more frequent than birthdays.

BankHolidayBeard would potentially have 8 times as many beards on it than BirthdayBeard, simply due to the comparative number of occasions per year. But the name wasn’t as catchy, and so I lost interest.

(photo coutresy of The Quest For Every Beard Type.)

RateMyCramp

Whenever you get cramp, say in your foot or leg, take a photo of it any upload it to the site. Then people could vote on it, using Top Trump –style ratings; Pain rating, Severity, skill shot….

It occurred to me how unlikely it is that people would:

a) Have a camera handy when cramp arose
b) Be able to expose the cramped area to get a good photo of it
c) Be willing to ignore the pain and go in search of a camera if one wasn’t to hand
d) Want photos of their contorted body parts online

So, because I do like the idea of a rating site, I went from RateMyCramp to RateMyCrossing, where people could have photos of themselves using various Pelican or Zebra crossings. I’m not sure how I made the leap from cramp to crossing, other than they both start with cr.

PublicApology

I used to work with a comedy genius called David Langin. I don’t think he meant to be as funny as he was, as he didn’t seem to put any thought into being funny. He was just naturally funny. Every so often he’d insult me in an amusing way. Maybe a few days later I’d insult him back, in an equally jokey way. The insults that went back and forth grew increasingly insulting and, subsequently, increasingly funny.

I wrote down all the insults that we had mutually come up with, embellished them slightly, making Dave the subject of them all, and put them online. I showed them to Dave, not telling him what I’d done. He started to read through the Public Apology list. He laughed that heartily after every few lines that he had to take breaks away from his screen to recover before carrying on.

I thought that a back-handed apology site, like the one that Dave and I had produced, would be a great idea. People could log on and leave pretend apologies.

Things like “To Gary, I’m sorry I stole your milk and topped it up with tip-ex.” and “To Pat, I wanted to apologise for ruining the hot water tap and making the shower cold every single morning.” It ended up being incredibly UNfunny.

In the end I realised that the Public Apology page was only funny because Dave had unknowingly written the majority of it, so I scrapped the idea.

MMXI

I had so many ideas for a website entitled MMXI (roman numerals for 2011) that I actually bought the name mmxi.co.uk in 2010 in preparation. It could have been a news site, storing the 2011 news as it happens to keep a record of the year, it could have been a fun questionnaire site that contained nothing but fun questions for visitors to answer that would serve as a record of the type of people who were online during 2011, it could have been a daily photograph site where I take one photo every day for a full year….

I never got around to deciding what I should use it for and so now, a little late in the day seeing as it is August 2011, I have a short catchy domain name that I have no use for. If you want it, and you have an idea for what to use it for, just let me know. If your idea is good, you can have it for free. (if you’re a member of 123-reg, I can transfer it to you for free, otherwise the transfer fee is about a fiver.)