Worst Web Sites 2009

The problem isn’t letting other sites influence your design—it’s letting other sites influence your design too much. “But Vincent, didn’t you say in an earlier chapter to ‘follow the leader’ and do what they do?” Yes, I did. There’s a big difference between putting your main navigation bar at the top of the page and your subnavigation on the left side and directly “borrowing” the look of Amazon.com’s navigation (see Figures later in the chapter). This section looks at some sites that may have slipped over the edge of acceptable influence. I say “may” because there’s really no way to determine which site is the one influencing the other.

There are several reasons one site may look like another:

1. The same design firm may have been used on both sites.

2. Both sites may have used the same design template. Dreamweaver, the Web design editing package from Macromedia, comes with many downloadable templates. The Figure below shows a band site template.

Macromedia's Band Site Template

3. A site may have received permission to mimic the look.

4. A site may be a parody of a more famous site. There are many sites that sell or give away templates. The figure below shows just one of the templates sold by Project Seven.

Project 7's DP7 template

The figure below shows the site of someone who bought and used the template.

Old version of FixingYourWebsite.com

Design Level Over 80%

In some states, you're considered to be driving a vehicle under the influence if your blood alcohol level is .08% or greater. The following Web sites may also be over the legal limit of design influence-80 percent. Once again, it's difficult to know for sure the reasons for the similarities. Maybe we have designers who use the same design on multiple projects; maybe we have some serious template use; or maybe it's worse.

Amazon.com Variants

In Chapter 3 I mentioned that designers should "Follow the Leader," to take advantage of proven design strategies and provide site visitors with a familiar interface, and one of the leaders I used as an example was Amazon.com. Unfortunately, some sites have done a lot more than follow Amazon.com.

Amazon's gone through a whole series of design changes. The figure below shows the site as it looked in late 2001.

Amazon.com October 27, 2001

Unfortunately, some people haven't learned that if you're going to "borrow," it will be less noticeable if you avoid borrowing from well-known sites. The next three figures show some sites that resemble Amazon.com.

Amazon clone Musician's Friend