His latest is that he wants to ring a bell, buzzer, or some sort of alarm inside the office whenever someone clicks on a certain link on our website (a la Amazon's early days).

This is closely related to the "turn on the red lava lamp when the build breaks" problem, which, as people note above, is well-solved using some off-the-shelf X10 components plus some X10 modules from CPAN. Wire the remote site to tickle a local server (via HTTP or whatever), and have the local server do the X10 control. The X10 folks even sell a semi-obnoxious doorbell module.

One piece of advice: With any sort of "ring the bell" mechanism in operation, a handy pair of tools to have nearby are a ski mask and a pair of wire cutters.