All Websites Look the Same

The point of a website is to communicate information with your users. Design is important only so far as it helps with this goal. All books look the same too - a stack of paper between two covers made of cardboard, bound on the left side, and containing text and/or pictures. The content is what differentiates them. These are two of my favorite websites:

www.sheldonbrown.com www.toyodiy.com

Neither has got anything interesting in the way of design and I don't care at all. Both of them are completely loaded with content that has been worth (to me) hundreds or thousands of dollars in saved money and effort.

Why is this a bad thing designers must be "guilty of"? Most websites are built around providing some sort of commercial service / product, so the number 1 goal of design is to get out of the way of the user paying money and receiving service. If the design was radically different website to website for no other reason than artistic-special-snowflakia, then as a designer you're putting on extra cognitive load onto your users and forcing them to think about things that ultimately don't matter to either you or them.

Literally everything from cars (colorful sells with engine in front and some seats in the middle, brake is left of the accelerator) to desktops (mother board, 4 RAM slots, 1 CPU slot, USB slots, etc.) to stores (carts out front, role of checkout stands next, isle separated by content after) benefits tremendously from standardization, and are what makes modern life even remotely livable.

Looks like I'm in the minority in agreeing with the author's sentiments. It's a counter-intuitive argument but I'll try to make it...

I'm of the motherfuckingwebsite.com school of thought--an evangelist for simple design--but I think simple and unique often go hand-in-hand.

Take my industry: newspapers. Ninety-nine percent take a flat-pack, everyfuckingwebsite.com approach. I think that conformity compromises design. Readability should be at the heart of most sites--let alone news sites--yet I find most hard to read for colours, distractions and so on.

The news websites I enjoy are simple and unique--like the Drudge Report and Hacker News, which are pretty much just a list of links with minimal layers. I think that gets to the core of my purpose as a reader: no bullshit clicking around for ages to find what I want/need to read--just here's the news in our view.

For me, that's a big reason for the Daily Mail's success too. Content aside, I think their presentation of news is second to none. You could argue it's like a lot of sites but I disagree: few run tall pictures, nine-deck headlines and so on. MailOnline's production is similar to the way editors put a page together for print. They've transitioned much of the craft online. I think that's how the website retains something of a newspaper 'feel' which most have lost.

Anyway, I should stop writing, I'm going off on tangents and probably talking gibberish, just wanted to chuck in my 2p.

Functional consistency is easier on your visitors, while visual differentiation (the actual pictures you select, mostly) helps identification of your site.

I wouldn't call it "conformity" at all.

I suspect another big reason is, if you're mostly a backend guy and you're building the site and can't afford someone to worry about the front end, how do you make your site responsive and mobile friendly? Bootstrap.

It's (extremely) easy to learn and (as mentioned in other comments) its ubiquity means people come to expect it and are already familiar with the UI.

I think the bigger thought here is that "change is uncomfortable". It's also unfamiliar.

Also, the designers to whom this article references work for clients, who are not the visionaries. And the design agencies job is to make them happy, via conformity.

It's better to use designs people are familiar with as opposed to something truly novel - which can cause confusion.