It’s a Monster of a Website

It was a dark and stormy night…

Your future customer picks up her smartphone looking, hoping to find someone, anyone who can help. The thunder crashes and the strobe of lightning flashes through her front window. She sees a shadow, hears a creak in the floor behind her. She turns. 

Nothing there. She turns back to her phone, opens the browser and searches “[insert your product or service] near me.”

She sees them but doesn’t believe it—creeping and crawling, some of them ancient, seemingly dead. Her thumb moves, as if controlled by another, morbid curiosity fueling the click.

What horror…is this?

The Haunted Hall of Websites

The Goblins

They are everywhere, moving independently, seemingly related but with no real direction or cohesion. They cackle and shout and scream random things in the deep recesses of the web, indifferent whether any soul hears them or not. Their total recklessness is terrifying. They are chaos incarnate. 

Social media is free … or is it? You sign up and sell your data to anyone those grimey, scheming tech giants want. It starts with one and then trends hit and—before you know it—you’re creating content for multiple platforms with no clear direction, further muddling the image of your brand, obscuring who you are and what you offer like a well-timed cinematic fog. 

The Skeleton

The potential customer clicks and turns onto a long-forgotten corner of the internet, and it is just lying there. It clatters, it’s jaw moving like it might speak, but no words come out. It might be frightening for the fact that at one time it was functional, walking around, doing stuff. But it is now a broken husk of what it once was, pieces missing, barely loading. 

Flash is dead … and it’s never coming back …

The Vampire

This was once your baby, a pet project that, at the time, so many years ago, gave you the edge. This site was a pioneer but somewhere along the way, it met a dark, menacing creature that transformed it into the thing she sees before her. 

Now, it roams the shadows of the web, luring unsuspecting visitors like her and its owners of the precious time and money it takes to keep such an abomination in its current state of undeath. Surely, such a wretched creature should be staked through its digital heart to make way for the modern and the living. 

The Witch

She seemed like a sweet old lady, offering an apple or candy or a spell to make your products more visible, to solve your marketing issues. It was a cheap and easy solution, but by the time you realized there was no such thing, it was too late and she had you in her clutches. 

Now, she assails visitors with popups, malware and ads. You call, email, message, but to no avail. The monster of a website contains no provisions for support, unless you’re willing to pay … extra … You got any firstborns handy?

The Wolfman….Wolfwoman….Wolfperson?

It saunters across the screen, fresh and seemingly well designed. It looks … pretty. If it had hair, it would be perfect but, as she attempts to click through, the fog rolls in, the digital forest darkens, the moon opens like a giant lidless eye and she hears … a blood-curdling howl … and realizes it is her own voice. 

She thought this site looked great. But trying to find her way through it is a nightmare—total dysfunction. Nothing seems organic and the sitemap is confusing. How many clicks does it take to find what she actually needs? No one knows … because, after wandering into this seemingly harmless site, she was never heard from again.

Frankenstein’s Monster

The ultimate and terrifying DIY project. You had the best of intentions. You just wanted to create something— but then it went LIVE. The messaging was beyond unclear. It looks off … crudely stitched together, like its creator didn’t really know what they were getting themselves into. 

Now this monster of a website lives among the wilds of the internet, frightening those onlookers unfortunate enough to run across it. The thing might be functional, but it looks like the walking dead, judged by users before they can even get to the heart of what you do. 

The customer steps from behind the curtain, pale as a specter. There is a noise behind her. A broken chatbot pings over and over and over…

I guess I don’t really need that after all,” she whispers to herself. Dun dun dun…


At Rooted Web, we want you to avoid the things that go bump in the internet, to build a site that reflects you, not who you once were or what you think is possible. Contact us and together we can turn your monster of a website into a digital success story.

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Samantha Prost

Samantha Prost is a digital content writer with almost 10 years of experience who uses her upbeat and creative energy to write fresh, fun and custom content for our clients.

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