The Race to Sameness

Why are more and more sites looking like clones?

[Wlauzon]

Lately I have been seeing a trend - mostly on corporate and ecommerce sites - where every one looks visually like the last 93 sites you looked at.

I recall back in the 'good old days' (which really were not, but that is another thread..) where a great many sites were instantly recognizable or at least stood out somehow. Granted, some were ugly and horribly coded, but when you landed on that site it was almost like a trademark - you knew where you were the 2nd time there.

But now it seems like every site is a clone. We are in a small niche industry, with maybe 50 max serious competitors. Yet when I look at most of our competitors sites, I have to look at the name at the top to know where I am. That got me wondering, so I looked around and see the same trend in many other industries. It's all "use layout B, insert logo/header here" and presto instant site.

Since noticing this a couple of weeks ago we have started doing little things to make our sites stand out from the herd. Not sure if it will have any real effect on sales or whatever, but hey, at least we might get remembered as the site with the cute dancing iguanas or something....

[centime]

As more an more websites arrive, individuallity might become difficult, especially if they are business vehicles

Once a working successful look has been found, every one follows suit :)

A bit like business suites, department stores, jewelers, banks

[King_Fisher]

Too many templates, too few original ideas!...KF

[ytswy]

Got to plead guilty to this - if you visit any of my ecommerce sites, you're going to see an oscommerce site customised to a greater or lesser degree.

Why? 1) It's a lot cheaper and quicker to customise an existing solution.

2) I tend to think that an ecommerce site is the wrong place to innovate in terms of design; people are used to the steps needed to add an item to their cart and checkout on a typical ecommerce site. I'd rather give them what they expect and let them give me money, rather than impress them with my unique look and feel.

[Wlauzon]

an ecommerce site is the wrong place to innovate in terms of design...

I am not talking about the basic design - that is how the browsing to order cart works.

I am talking about how nearly every site uses almost the same colors, the same header (usually with some kind of 'wavy' pattern in the logo and/or header banner), the same bland backgrounds, etc.

Now I realize that you can't take an ecommerce site and fill it with a rainbow flash background and scenes from Dante's Inferno, but does everything have to be black on white, with the same shade-of-blue generic looking header/banner, the same generic template generated look?

Maybe it's just me, but I feel that most sites could use a little more real 'art' in the presentation.

[centime]

In the city of London, Every bankers suite looks the same :)

I guess you are an arts kinda guy :)

its all good, but when you're servicing big loans, or report results to anxious investors,

all most folk really want is a business that delivers the expected out come.

An when a innovative unique design starts succeeding,,,

You guessed it, very soon its no longer unique

[jsinger]

You miss all those animated gifs and illegible fonts from the 90s? Or the orange text on red background?

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I do hate the OSCommerce lookalike sites.

[jbinbpt]

CMS. An easy way to get new content up fast.

[cmarshall]

Remember all the Amazon clones? There was even a classification in Web Pages That Suck for the Amazon clone.

Monkey see; monkey do...

[justgowithit]

Monkey see; monkey do...

or... why recreate the wheel?

For a company like Amazon that has a few more zeros after their market research budget than most - why wouldn't you take a page or two from their design book?

[cmarshall]

That's a very good point, and probably the best explanation for it.

However, some of those Amazon clones were REAL clones, even having the same classnames and comments as Amazon.