Upping the ante.

A colleague thought it would be lots of fun to make a joke about Castor Design's extremely quirky site at www.castordesign.ca--'A load of pollux' was the tagline. This is precisely the kind of site I urge serious architectural practices to avoid even taking a sideways glance at. And the technical muddle: in certain parts of the site there is no back button. You have to edit the url to get back to the home page. When you get there it's a blackboard with the indistinct image of possibly some bloke scaling a crag. When you click on 'Contact', along comes a bloke in an orange woollen beanie who scribbles the practice's phone number and email address and exits left. Beanie reappears when you click on 'Vitals' and adds a scribbled chalk mission statement only part of which you can read. You click on the final heading, 'Projects', and a list of recent projects assembles itself and you click. I quite liked the T-shirts and the portable sauna but other pages are simply confusing. Oh, and there is music. Sometimes. My colleague said 'supremely silly, quite up themselves, but I rather like it'. And so do I--not because it's a classic of how not to manage a website--which it is--but because it raises the question of how architectural web sites can be lots of fun and keep surfers admiring the professional (aka hireable) qualities of the practice. The Lord help us all if there is no answer to that.