How many Heeeeey Hooooo’s do you think the world has seen and heard?

The site has gotten around 50m unique visitors, and you have to assume they’ve been redirected a few times back and forth…so, god….a bazillion? I’ve made some really big websites for clients like Google and Apple and I will guarantee more people have gone to Heeeey-hoooo.
 

What were the circumstances behind creating heeeeeey Hoooooo?

Sometimes “creative” people need a kick in the ass and some structure to stop being lazy. I decided to do one of those 30 days of creativity where you try to make a project every day for a month. This stupid site was one of the things I made.

I remember the first version had some poorly illustrated hands-in-the-air images that looked like the glove from the Hamburger Helper commercials. Once I got rid of those terrible illustrations the site got a lot more traffic.
 

What was the hardest part of building it?

Technically the site is pretty basic…it is just a javascript redirect back and forth between two domains. The first version of the site would play a mp3 of the “hey…hooo” part of Naughty by Nature’s Hip hop hooray.

Thanks to everyone’s horrible spammy sites chrome and safari have disabled auto-playing audio so I had to take the music out. It’s obviously way better with the music, so that’s a bit sad.

I get at least one message a week from someone being really pissed off the site doesn’t make sound anymore. I’m sorry, it’s not my fault!
 

What came first, the domain or the code?

I had to register the domains first for the idea to work. I tried to get domain names that had the least amount of e’s an o’s possible and I guess I’m an idiot because i registered heeeeeeeey.com which has 8 e’s and hooooooooo.com which has 9 o’s. This has caused a lot of confusion for me because I always forget the URLs.
 

What is the weirdest thing that has come from owning/running such a unique-not-really-having-a-purpose site?

I get a lot of terrible ad salesmen that want to buy the site or plaster ads on it. Real vile people.

Someone told me they put the site up on all of the computers at any Apple Store they go to.
 

What got you into web development?

I wanted to make a fansite for the Smashing Pumpkins when I was like 11 years old. I learned HTML and all of that and have been literally doing that all day every since (for clients and myself, not the Smashing Pumpkins)
 

How long ago did you launch the site / what are you working on now?

I launched this way back in 2013. Now I’m working on what feels like everything. I’m lucky to be busy during this insane quarantine and collapse of the world, but wish I was making more useless stuff.
 

What is your favorite site on the internet?

If i were honest it would be Twitter…I like to just scroll through it and be mad all day.