Your templates are killing the internet
In the emerging realm of information architecture real data taken from carefully measured testing is used to help map out a user’s ideal interaction with a website. Over time we have learned that users scan web pages in certain ways, their eyes seeking out patterns that they have come to expect and so on. This information is used as the basis for making decisions about where elements will sit on a website and how the site will guide a user through a journey to achieve their desired outcome.
One of the great challenges for any serious web designer in the current age is to carefully marry the important and necessary aspects of user experience and information architecture with the right amount of creative freedom to really produce innovative design.
When you stop to think about most of the websites that you use on a regular basis, you will find that many of them have a very similar layout. In many cases layout and design is so similar that it is reminiscent of pre-fab kit homes. This is even more true in the era of the quickly skinned blog or site. MySpace pages and WordPress blogs lend themselves to being quickly “customised” with your choice of hundreds of templates.