Many years ago, a book titled Always Bear Left maintained that doing just that was the smartest strategy for dealing with lines at Disneyland. When most folks came to a fork in the queue, they instinctively veered to the right; keeping to the left supposedly left you with less competition on your way into a ride.

I don’t know if that approach gets you onto Pirates of the Carribbean any faster. But I do know that on the Web, cheerfully doing the precise opposite of what universally-accepted best practices would have you do often works wonderfully well.

A couple of examples:

–Everybody knows that evenings and weekends are quiet on the Web, and so you should concentrate your efforts on mornings and weekdays. Which means that content that goes up during “off hours” has less competition. At both PC World and Technologizer, some of our very best traffic days have come on weekends, and we’ve had success with late-afternoon posting.

–Any search engine consultant will tell you that stuffing headlines with keywords is all-important. Which means that many headlines on the Web are deadly dull, and ones with panache will get noticed. And truth to tell, Google is so damn smart that it’ll identify your stories without heavy-handed SEO.

I don’t mean to scoff at best practices; I love to learn what works for other sites, and I cheerfully steal good ideas as often as possible. And I firmly believe that there’s no such thing as randomness on the Web–the actions you take as a publisher will determine whether your site’s a smash or a flop. But conventional wisdom is no substitute for real-world experience. And the great thing about the Web is that there’s little downside to trying something unconventional and seeing what happens.