>I agree about S/N ratio in page contents but we're a couple of rational developer types. Web sites are for more normal people and the touchy-feely coloured-pencil crowd - and if we're being honest, the suppressed emotional parts of us rational types. I remember reading decades ago that persuasion is 20% what you say, and 80% how you say it. Over the years I've found little reason to doubt that, at especially cynical times I've thought the ratio is more like 5%/95%. So maybe it's not unreasonable that web page contents should be 20% content and 80% window dressing ;)

In the immortal words of Eddie Izzard, "it's 70% how you look, 20% how you sound, and 10% what you say". Well, in my case, the looks are a statement too.

The point is the usual "new tool, let's do something using the wizard just to see how it works" - and then 98% of people don't move beyond that point. Remember the time when half the web bore obvious marks of being done in... I don't remember what the name of the tool was, but it was by M$, had server-side extensions and was launched about 1998 or so. If I saw the name I may recognize it :). You even saw pages named "Title goes here".

It's still so. Almost all corporate pages look the same, originality is frowned upon, and everyone follows the same guidelines. It's boring. Hence my statement - technologies come and go, and the layout of this website hasn't changed much since 2003. Or 1999, for that matter (that's when first few pages came to be, before I had real dbfs and kept all content in one text file).