• Easter Eggs in Websites

    Date

    May 14th, 2020

    I love Easter-eggs, but they're entirely pointless for your average site visitor. I assume that the average person taking a look at my website is probably someone with a somewhat technical background, so I assume you're not the average site visitor.

    If I stumble on to a hidden easter-egg that lets me see that the developer put some extra effort in, I really like that. There are tons of ways to add a bit of character in to your website to show that you appreciate it when someone tries to take a look under the hood.

    • Humorous 404 pages

    • Console events

    • Ad-block related events

    • Hidden DOM content

    • Keyboard prompted events

    • Time-specific events (Like Halloween, or Christmas)

    Tools for adding Easter Eggs

    The Konami Code package

    One common trend I see in website easter eggs is the Konami Code, a series of button prompts that usually lead to something out of the ordinary happening. The code is as follows:

    Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A

    This is something that was added to over 100 games. It's also since been added to some websites. This is something that you can do, too. Some clever engineer added a package for this which you can find here. I really like this because it's super lightweight, and allows you to pass any callback function you like.

    There are tons of websites that have the Konami code, including BuzzFeed - finally, a reason to look at that website.

    Easter Egg Collection package

    Alternatively, if you want to just use some pre-generated easter eggs, a developer has created a collection and placed it all in a lesser-known single package. The developer has also created some documentation showcasing this.

    My website Easter Eggs

    I've included a handful of Easter eggs on my website. Some big, some small. I've got some viewport specific ones, and some more common ones that you might need very little help finding.

    I personally think it's a huge shame to spoil all of the easter eggs I've added to this website, but at the time of writing, there is about 10 Easter Eggs. The classification of what an Easter Egg is can be sort of vague, as some of them are pretty obvious and others are hidden in a totally obscure way, so you may have already seen some of them.

    If you find any Easter Eggs that you liked, please tweet me @billy_geoghegan and let me know!

A cartoon of Bill