All the designs in the areas generally available to the public were simple and sparse, but employed mysterious text, purposefully difficult navigation and javascript tricks to create an intriguing experience that suggested something deeper, and which appealed to curious visitors, hackers, and others.
The site was described as "a very private and somewhat mysterious place for Net-artists to hang out and create Web-art [or Net-art, as it was called in the late 1990s], without being directly visible to the grand public.
"[5] A more jaundiced view was that Aronson had simply chanced upon an available domain, and decided to use it for Web art that provoked curiosity, entertained, and "messed with the visitors' heads.
In an interview with the New York Times in 1998 he suggested Hell.com was "a vast creative project that exists in a secret online location, a private digital environment assembled over the past year by 50 new media artists who continue to collaborate on its chaotic shape and ever-changing content.
A sub-domain of Hell.com, bat.hell.com Archived 2007-02-24 at the Wayback Machine stated:HELL.COM is a private parallel network of acknowledged visionaries with diverse skillsets working from 20 nations.
Described as the 'bleeding edge of the web' by the BBC, the project has been pushing the boundaries of the internet to discover new levels of human communication.It was surmised that Hell.com's members, at least partially, were creative designers specialising in creating sites like Hell.com which were abstract, dark, intractable, and mysterious.
[14] As well, under the title "INVISIBLE", BAT stated that it worked "confidentially as a mercenary resource", apparently for "leading advertising, communications, and technology companies.
For instance: Sometime in 1997, the website 0100101110101101.org acquired the webpage code of Hell.com during the first 48 hours of one of its events and created a similar one as "a digital monument to the principles upon which the Internet runs," and an anticopyright.
[22] "'The belief that information must be free,'" explained at the time (by) Renato, (a) 0100101110101101.ORG spokesman, 'is a tribute to the way in which a very good computer or a valid program works: binary numbers move in accordance with the most logic, direct and necessary way to do their complex function.
In an interview with Domenico Quarenta of the magazine Cluster, Aronson stated that having the most visible address is "negative for us, but has a large value… which could be exchanged for resources to help further the goals of the project."