Help is Needed! Abandoned Website Dying Torn Apart by Marketing Vultures

Max Shestov
7 min readApr 7, 2021

A sad story about how a highly authoritative website with quality content became an orphan and continues to surf the internet alone.

A Genuine Wish to Revive Abandoned Website: My Passion Project

Website designs fascinate me. I cannot help appreciating the site designs and the designer’s efforts. I encounter a lot of wonderful web designs on a daily basis while working and researching my web development projects.

One day we received an unsolicited email from an overseas marketing company with a proposal to promote our company’s website. I was curious but skeptical, so I used one of our management platforms to check their website authority. Surprisingly it was high. I realized that the reason their website had become so authoritative is that they had thousands of backlinks connected to their website. Most of the referring domains were of poor quality, but one of the domain names attracted my attention.

When I clicked the link, I came across a beautifully designed, user-friendly interface with carefully selected color combinations and fonts, graphics, and ease of operation within the web design. The website was created as a community for design experts and passionate from all over the world with the main focus on Interior Design. There was only one ugly thing that visually destroyed everything. I saw a huge feed of spammy comments! There were more than 1,000 of them on a single page!

I thought to myself, “How could the admins of this website allow this to happen?”

I started to walk through the elegant website and had the sudden realization that the website looked like it had been tossed.

The homepage of INNER DESIGN website looked absolutely stunning in 2011

And sure enough, I found out that after 2014, they were not posting anything on the website nor were they active on the various social media channels: Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest which they had set up to connect with their customers and fans.

So I found that the site innerdesign.com was created in 2011, on the cutting edge of technology during that period of time, and it still looks great!

Being a web designer myself, I understand how much planning and effort might have been put into this one to create with lesser-known resources and knowledge.

The awesome The Design Network For Interior Design Lovers which was up and active in 2011 and was running so seamlessly with all social media in place, interacting with customers on a daily basis till 2014 suddenly became lifeless and nobody bothered?

Abandoned Website Innerdesign.com

I became seriously interested in the site.

There must be somebody or some group who can follow up and help those in need? I thought, “Let us give it a try.”

One possibility was that they might have gone out of business.

Or, they simply created it and forgot about it, to move to some other lucrative business? Probably not because of the money and effort spent on such an elegant and functional site. I believed that many people would be willing to pay a good price for it.

Perhaps the owners of INNER DESIGN do not exist anymore.

Whatever the reason for abandoning such a beautiful, organic site with such seamless navigation, by an owner who once upon a time fared so well in online business.

There are numerous sites on the web which seem to be non-operational for years and are abandoned by the owners. I really feel sorry for such sites. There are so many questions that come to mind.

What might be the reason?

What possibly could have gone wrong?

The possibility is that some unfortunate event occurred to the owners of INNER DESIGN all of a sudden? The reason must be something catastrophic. Something this good could not have been abandoned without a very serious reason.

In my opinion, web design is an art that only a few possess.

Innerdesign.com was built on WordPress CMS and seems to be perfect even by today’s standards, but the bad part is this abandoned site has become the dumping ground for all sorts of malicious activities. You also might notice that the speed of the page’s loading is very slow.

Users are not paying attention to its design and functional aspects but feeding on it like vultures to pick up the design nuances and content and embed their codes and links to establish their websites.

It is pathetic and pitiful!

What a waste.

They need our help and support to resurface, revamp and re-establish the site provided they still exist.

This website has all the sections such as community, interesting blogs, creative interviews, agenda, questions, and shop that some websites boasting to be the best in the business lack even today.

Authentic Shop page of Innerdesign.com

It also has featured events, featured portfolios, and featured posts to be current and happening platforms.

The next thing I thought about was that we as a web community should try to revamp this website which has high Google rankings [ Alexa ranking is 89,315 ].

I, along with my team, decided to contact them, but that step, as expected, turned out to be not so easy. The site administrators are not answering calls, and emails sent to reach out and connect are returned with error messages.

The “Creative Web” agency from Milan which created this website has a broken contact form. Our attempt to contact them by commenting under one of the blog’s posts has gone unanswered.

The website probably has Italian roots. The domain name and hosting service are probably in auto-renewal mode. The Facebook page has three administrators from Italy but sadly, it doesn’t reveal their profiles.

Twitter and Facebook pages of INNER DESIGN

Business websites require constant updates to be current and to maintain a customer base.

Not replying to customer queries might drop their ranking in the market and create a sense of frustration in customers if they expect some business from any website.

If this is the case that you are extremely busy or not managing the website from time to time, it might create the impression that you are out of business. You might lose future customers.

This is surprisingly not the case with this site. I wonder if the website has some post-paid contracts that are still active though not functional.

To the owners or administrators: If you are in business and around, please contact us and we can help you out of this dark phase. Our effort to reach you is returned with the following message:

Email return message from Mail Delivery System

If anyone or you possibly know what happened, please reach out as we do not want the website to be trapped in the dark.

INNER DESIGN has become an ignored and abandoned site and the dumping ground for a lot of malicious activities. People from all over the globe are using the site to communicate using the platform as a vehicle for spam comments trying to fetch backlinks to their websites.

Because of the high authority of the website, spammers use this backlink on their own websites for their own promotion.

INNER DESIGN website is being used as a vehicle for some strange conversations

All of this causes a loss of authority of INNER DESIGN and slows down the site. It’s a shame this is happening to such a defenseless website.

I genuinely would like to help the site owners (if they exist) clean, revamp, and refurbish the site and make it look new with some tweaks here and there. It will do wonders.

My humble request to the entire web community: Let’s find out the way to make innerdesign.com up and running again, or at least figure out what happened.

Let us save this web orphan from surfing on the internet alone. If we do not care now, then ultimately it will fall into bad hackers’ hands or ultimately die a tragic death. If the article can make an impact or if it reaches the site owner someday, we can hope. Or if some of you can reach out to them, please do so!

We genuinely care! Our Team can help you resurface in all the possible ways!”

--

--

Max Shestov

Lead Web Developer. Husband of a wonderful wife, Entrepreneur, Dad