How we built an April Fools’ prank site in 48 hours
On 1 April 2017, we launched our April Fools’ prank site called MomoCupid — a fake dating site for geeks. Being geeks and running MomoCentral — a tech talent matching platform ourselves, we thought it’d be fun to come up with the story that we’ve decided to be real, literal matchmakers of love instead!
The problem we (my CTO Jason and myself) only had 48 hours to put the site together and get it launched — and we had nothing! In this article we will detail all the shortcuts we took to get a full fledged dating site up within 48 hours. Maybe it’ll be useful for someone looking to seriously, quickly, launch something similar in the future! :)
1. Picking a platform/theme
Being extremely familiar with the Wordpress platform, we decided to start by seeing what dating-related themes there were available on ThemeForest. Not surprisingly, voila! There were a few good themes we could buy and install, for just $59 — complete with a full blown dating site features like private messaging, favorites, user registration, logins, you name it.
2. Domain Registration + Wordpress Installation
Being coders ourselves, our default mode was to just wind up our dev server and get Wordpress and the theme installed. For the benefit of non-techies reading this, we recommend using a service like BlueHost and their one-click install feature. This should get a Wordpress site up complete with domain registration within, say 20 minutes? No coding knowledge required.
3. Theme Installation
After Wordpress was set up, we installed the theme we selected. This was done through the Wordpress admin panel’s interface. All by clicks, no coding. If you’re new to Wordpress, always check the theme folder. There is usually a Theme Installation guide in all the themes you purchase guiding you through the steps needed to install the theme. Estimated time: 1–3 hours depending on how big the theme is, how long it takes to install the demo data, if any problems occur during installation, etc.
4. Content
As we decided to go with the “Pet Club” theme, which was essentially a dating site for pets, our home page after installing the theme and demo content looked like this.
Obviously we had to “humanize” it by replacing the content! Thankfully we managed to get contributed content from our tech talents quickly for this! (Thanks guys for being so supportive of this on short notice!)
Having said that, we still took a good 10 hours to get all the content in, including image edits, writing content for pages like About Us, talent profiles, etc. Yes, the About Us page actually took us the longest to do because we were already exhausted from popping everyone’s profile and photos in. Evidently, content writing is definitely NOT our forte! Haha!
Oh yes, before I forget, this site called Pexels is fantastic for free stock images!
5. Styling
The very cool thing about all these themes is most of the time they come with a drag and drop visual composer that lets you easily pop content in with 0 to minimal coding. We could easily change the style colors, branding, fonts, etc as well!
After about 2 hours on styling, the site was successfully HUMANIZED! No longer looking like a pet dating site eh? ;)
6. Hiding Features
This is the tricky part. The default theme came with a lot of features built-in. User registration, login, favorites, private messaging, etc. However, we had to decide among ourselves how far we wanted to take this prank.
What if people put in effort to register an account, and actually attempt to contact some profiles only to find out it was fake? That’d be a waste of people’s times. We didn’t want to take our prank too far.
We decided to hide all the features beyond just viewing profiles. No user registration, messaging, logins, favorites, etc.
Thankfully MOST of the features could be shut off from the admin panel without coding. For some parts that needed coding, we took the lazy way of just hiding all the buttons related to it!
E.g: To remove user login/registration, we just hid ALL the buttons related to it. Note: Some of these required coding on our side but it was still quick and minimal! :)
7. Launch and aftermath!
We “launched” by announcing it on our usual social media outlets, and posted it onto HackerNews, Product Hunt and Reddit. Most people got that it was a prank as it launched on April Fools’. A few folks wrote in wishing it was REAL. Some wrote in just to say although it’s a prank, it was fun for them to read all the geeky jokes on the profiles.
However, until today, a full 2 weeks+ after the prank, there are people asking us about our “Pivot” and why we chose to do MomoCupid. When we told them it was a prank, they were shocked! I guess that’s probably because our “APRIL FOOLS!” message can only be found if you attempt to click on anyone’s profile pictures or click the “Date a geek now” button.
The folks who did not click on the triggers totally missed it was a prank. I guess it shows they were not interested in any of our geeks! (Or were attached).
Closing Notes
- There you have it! The step by step guide on how we put together our April Fools’ prank in 48 hours!
- You can use the exact same steps we did to launch your real, full-fledged dating site (or any Wordpress-based site — corporate websites, e-commerce sites, marketplace, etc).
- Note that for a REAL site that’s not for fun pranking, you’d want to spend way more time on testing, ensuring content is written properly, the UX and messaging is spot on. It is not advisable to launch hastily like us in 48 hours if you can avoid it.
- Lastly, if we were to do this again, we’d probably make the content more over the top/unbelievable so people who missed our hot spots would probably figure it was a prank or parody site.
Jason’s Easter Egg
Jason actually hid an Easter Egg somewhere on the site. I’m not telling you where obviously but if you’re a geek, you’d be able to figure it out! ;)
To date, no one has found the Easter Egg. I guess no one looked or he “overhid” it.
