Every web developer has a story. That one project that made them do a double take. The client that had an idea that was either genius, completely unhinged, or somewhere in between. After enough years in the industry you start collecting these stories and they become the stuff of legend at team meetings.
So the question came up recently, what are the craziest or most creative websites you’ve ever visited or personally been involved with? And it opened up some genuinely wild stories.
The Sugar Daddy Dating Site
Early on, a web agency merged with another company and inherited a client with them. The site was a dating platform specifically for sugar daddies. Young women would post their profiles, older men with money would browse and essentially pick who they wanted to take out for a weekend. The whole site was basically built around that concept.
It didn’t last. The site eventually ran into some serious legal issues, and if you think about it for more than two seconds, its not that hard to figure out why. They were trying very hard to frame it as “women who prefer successful men” and “men who appreciate younger, more vibrant companions” but no matter how they worded it, the whole thing had a certain vibe that was hard to shake.
That experience led to a pretty solid personal policy that’s still in use: if it feels weird, it is weird. More specifically, if you wouldn’t feel comfortable with your kid sitting on your lap while you’re working on it, don’t build it. And if your spouse walking into the room while the site is open on your screen would require any kind of explanation, that’s a no.
Most people are actually pretty cool with that when you tell them upfront. Strip clubs, escort services, anything in that territory, just pass.
The Guy Who Wanted to Build the Fourth Reich
This ones a bit darker. A guy came in with what he described as a grand vision for a website. He started with “we will not be replaced” and then followed that up with some of the most openly racist stuff anyone in the room had ever heard out loud. That got shut down immediately. No thanks, good luck finding someone else to build that for you.
He got aggressive after that, which wasn’t suprising. But yeah. There was a brief moment where someone could have been part of history. They passed.
The Food Review Dating App
This one is actually a concept that deserves to get built someday. The idea was a dating site built around food reviews. You’d leave reviews for restaurants, rate dishes, build out your food taste profile, and then get matched with people who had similar tastes. Like, if you’re a person who loves hole-in-the-wall Thai places and hates chain restaurants, you’d get matched with people who feel the same way.
A prototype got built and everything was moving along, but the guy needed outside investment to really take it to the next level. He was trying to get brands like Panda Express to come on as investors and it just never came together. The capital wasn’t there and the project quietly died.
Its actually kind of a bummer because the concept was genuinely interesting. Shared food taste is a real thing in compatibility, anyone whose been on a date where one person wants fine dining and the other wants Taco Bell knows what we’re talking about. Someone should build this.
The Moral of All of This
After enough time in web development, you develop a gut instinct for which projects are going to be fine and which ones are going to be a headache or worse. Racist manifestos, legal gray areas, anything that makes you pause and go “hmm”, trust that instinct. The best clients are the ones where you can look at the project and just feel good about what your building.
The wild ones make for great stories though.
