>>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 ;)
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>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.
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>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".
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>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).

I think there's some value in consistency. Sites I can't figure out how to navigate, or that start with a mandatory Flash intro get canned fast.

The tool you're thinking of was probably FrontPage - and yes, I do recall sites built that way :-/