I can't remember who coined this phrase but it's one which you will hear from time to time around the web, but may not know the meaning of. Very small is the number of people who have never seen or heard of Yahoo, the definitive internet search directory. Their's was one of the first .com success stories to enter the picture, and they have continued to be one of the most popular sites on the web for all manner of things. There is a reason for this.
Yahoo offers a service which has the advantage of being one of the first of its kind as well as very well put together. Their reputation for never losing the "human element" has also contributed to their popularity. Users find their service relatively easy to use as well as containing a wealth of good information (webmasters find their site to be considerably less friendly, especially if their site fits into more than one of Yahoo's preset categories). But let their be no misunderstanding on this point: Yahoo has not put very much thought or creativity into the design of their site. Other people may disagree with me, but the fact is that Yahoo's designers specified almost nothing in the way of the look and feel of their site, preferring to leave all of that up to the browser (experiment with your browser's preferences and see how much you can change Yahoo's look and feel). This was a choice that they made, and the result of it is that many users as well as designers (both amateur and professional) find Yahoo to be one of the ugliest and least visually appealing sites that there is.
If it had ended here then that would have been the end of it and we could have shuffled that one, hideous site off into the corner. Unfortunately for us all it did not end there. In fact, it grew.
Other people looked at Yahoo and, because they had no basis for artistic and attattractive design, assumed that its success was in some way to be attributed to its design. They also succumbed to the old idea that if they copied someone successful, then they too would be successful. With this idea in mind the blithely launched site after site which shared Yahoo's look and setup, but lacked its powerful and unique back-end, the real source of its success.
Another area of site design that we find over and over again across the digiscape of the web is the portal site. I don't know where the first portal was created. In all probability that first site was a long ways back in the history of the web. That first portal was probably a ground-breaking ideas, as well. Oh how things have changed.
The first portal that I can remember encountering was Netscape's web site. While more of a portal for their own products and services (originally), they did include a number of unrelated pieces of content which made their site seem like a good place to start your day from. Not long after that I saw another portal (perhaps Excite.com), which took these same ideas even further and made them even grander. At this point I was still impressed. Within a month or two, however, portals were springing up across the web, and every one of them was virtually indistinguishable from every other one. Not only did they share a look and layout with one another, they also shared content. In fact, they often all got their content from the same, specialized companies whose purpose it was to supply this content to every site who wanted it.
So what we had know were thousands of sites whose content could be roughly divided along these lines:
On top of that we had thousands of sites who had copied not only the content ideas from their successful fore-runners, but had copied their layout, colour choices, fonts, font sizes, and hierarchical structures. And the problem only grew as it became the accepted wisdom that portals did well, and that a site couldn't fail if it turned itself into a portal with all of a portal's myriad content and gunk. We know now that this belief is not the case and that portal sites can fail, but enough of them remain, and remain successful enough, that many new-comers think that it is still an assured formula for fiscal fortune.
For years, ever since the beginning of business and advertising (you'll need an ancient history book to find those dates), their have been successful merchants and less successful merchants have tried to copy them to increase their profits. Jumping ahead to our modern age we find this idea personified in the idea of the Fortune 500. What is this Fortune 500, you might ask? It is a group of the most successful corporations in the world, and is often held up as the definitive list of businesses who figured out how to do it right, and should therefore be emulated. You might then enquire how this effects us as designers.
Let me take this moment to say that many of the big business sites out there are very good designs (unlike Yahoo or most portals). My complaint against them is the lack of originality and the worship of conformity.
For years smaller, less prosperous merchants could look at the big boys and try to figure out how to mirror their successes (and profits). They copied practices, they emulated services, and they even tried to come up with similar names (I work for a company named Smart Solutions, Inc., dba MicroAge -- look up 'smart', 'solutions', and 'micro' on Altavista to see how often they appear in the names of computer and IT companies). All of these things led to many businesses resembling one another and this became the accepted way that things were.
What made you think it would be any different with the web?
Admittedly the first companies to make it big on the web were not the traditional giants, but those giants didn't take long to get themselves on to the web and to make large chunks of it over into their image (mostly they waited until the technology had matured to the point where their site could look as good as their brochures and proposals). The results of these things are the fact that most online bookstores look like Amazon.com, most computer manufacturers like IBM.com, most banks/brokerage houses like Prudential.com, etc. Why did all of these designers follow these ideals and and follow the herd?
There are three reasons that they might have done this.
Unfortunately this has always been the way the world worked for designers operating in the corporate world. There's very little that we can do to escape this conformity trap except to remove ourselves from it and go freelance, and even then you had better make sure that you've got a couple of "Fortune 500's" in your portfolio lest you lose potential clients who just don't know any better.
In closing there is not much that we can do to change the face of the web as it is now. We can, however, work hard to promote ideals of creativity, imagination, exploring the boundaries, and originality through the work that we do. The web is unique in history because it is a medium of expression which belongs first and foremost to the people, rather than to the institutions. It's time for us to take the web back and to let it grow and flower through the tender care of our artistic visions.
-A.G. Peabody , 07/31/2000
http://www.valaquenta.com