Tease Them Until They Cry ...

What good are friends if you can't tease them!

With all the ideas for website content that I've written for DesignStop.Com, I'm trying to encourage you to be creative and to have fun. Teasing your friends on a website provides plenty of creative opportunities and can be alot of fun. The basic idea here is that you make your friends the content of your site - and you make fun of them! I suppose if your friends are really "sensitive" you might want to be careful with just how much "fun" you have. When it comes to teasing, one person's idea of fun can be the recipient's worst nightmare. You have to know your friends well and watch that you're not taking the fun too far. If you make them cry, or if they plot to kill you, you've probably gone a little too far. Getting them to have a good laugh with you should be your goal.

Here are a number of ideas related to teasing your friends :

Yearbook idea - traditionally, school yearbooks have each student's picture with a short description of who they are, their likes/dislikes, favorite quote, etc. Adapting this concept to a website provides some interesting opportunities to tease your friends. Perhaps you can fake a whole "yearbook" featuring your friends as the students. I think this idea would be fun whether your friends really are students or they're senior citizens. You are the yearbook editor with the power to write whatever you want - heck you don't even have to tell your friends until it is finished!

"Personals" idea - You can have alot of fun with this one. Create a lonely-hearts site that has each friend's picture(s) along with the kind of soul-mate, or one-night-stand, they're supposedly trying to meet. Most people find writing a real personal ad for themselves very difficult - it is really easy when you do it for someone else! An interesting aspect of this is you could actually solicit emails from "interested" visitors to the site. Have all mail sent to you so you get to read it. You can post the best letters to the website for the amusement of your friends and the site's visitors. If you do something like this using email - I'd suggesting using some of the free email accounts you can get from DesignStop.Com rather than using your existing email account. It is easier to terminate the free accounts if the correspondence coming in starts to get out of hand.

Soap opera idea - I've already written about this idea in the context of just making up characters. Check it out by clicking here - you'll get some good ideas that you can adapt to making fun of your friends. Your soap's characters can be based on your friends. How much you have to "enhance" them from real life depends very much on your friends. Some people actually have lives that make television soap characters seem tame.

Photo Gallery - The idea here is simple. A straightforward gallery of pictures can be created. You annotate the pictures with humorous comments. You can make witty comments about they way they look, what they're doing, or what they're wearing. You can enlist the participation of site visitors by having a "caption" contest for a particularly goofy picture - allow the visitors to suggest an appropriate caption, via a form, guestbook, or email. Post the submissions. The prize can be something as stupid as a postcard from your home town ( play the postcard up as something very exclusive ). Another idea for making the site fun to visitors would be to allow them to vote for the best captions. i.e. Each photo might have three captions and they can vote for the one they think is most appropriate.

Stories - You don't have to put pictures on your website to have fun with your friends. You can create an interesting site where the focus is on the written word. Describe your friends in detail - perhaps even psychoanalyze them. What makes them tick? What do they find funny? What are their darkest secrets? - You don't have to "publish" their names! Now if you really want to have fun with your friends, all you have to do is also write about yourself - but be nowhere near as critical with yourself. That will really tick them off! To involve your site's visitors, ask them to email in advice specific to the individuals you've written about. You'd publish that advice on the website. A way you could make such a website more interesting is to then let all the friends you wrote about, write their own rebuttals. Because you are such a fair person you'd include the rebuttals on the website without editing them. All in all I think visitors to your site would find this unusual content interesting.

I hope you can see that it is possible to have some good clean fun at the expense of your friends. Actually they don't even have to be your "real friends" - you can do these ideas with your classmates or colleagues from work. It's just as easy to make fun of them! Of course if you get any inspiration from these ideas I hope you'll and let me know. It would be really nice to know someone agrees that teasing friends is fair game - if I had some I'd be teasing them! If you've had a bad experience teasing a former friend you can tell me about that too. I'll be your new friend - so long as you don't tease me!

PS - I suppose this is a disclaimer! If you pursue any of these ideas and your friends get upset and retaliate - don't blame me. Remember I don't know your friends or how far you can push them. You ( and them ) can be the only judge of where the line should be drawn.