Aardman Animations
We hosted and maintained the Aardman Animations website in its early years (early 1998, left) and
helped the Aards establish a durable Internet presence which reflected their own
special culture and approach.
The visitors to the Aardman website confirmed a suspicion I had been nuturing for some time. I believed that Internet users were more like a readership than an audience and unlike the broadcast media audience, where no-one ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the audience, Internet users are (mostly) polite, well-informed and do not take kindly to having their intelligence insulted.
I found my confirmation in the Aards Guestbook entries. Initially there was some very sensible concern that off-colour messages might be posted, on a site known to attract large numbers of kids. In three years and thousands of postings, we only ever had to delete two obscene ones, made several months apart from the same UK private school (sigh).
With this single exception, people were polite, well-informed and seemed to really appreciate it when you made an effort to be witty.
One day in 1999 there was a network fault, the separately-served Aardmarket online
shop went down and the Aardsite's link to the shop (right, home page 1999) stopped working.
We started to get dozens of email messages from Aards visitors informing us of the problem and we decided to edit the page to disable the link and add a note explaining why.
The note ended with the words: "Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible. In the meantime, here is some music ..." and we added a soundfile version of the Wallace and Gromit theme tune, setting an initial pause of 5secs (to allow people time to read the note). Within minutes someone had been sufficiently amused to a make wry appreciative posting in the Guest book.