Under the Sun

Everything online is templates. It's eye-opening.
I remember when I was taking a communications class in college I had a professor who owned a radio station. He wanted to check out another station to buy but had reservations about the format because he wanted something geared to the local market. He was looking around, but the station manager told him that NO radio stations were local. All of them were produced in large cities and then sent out to small stations. The production was deliberately presented in such a way that anyone listening to the radio might think that the broadcaster was just down the road, when in fact they could be a few states away.
Once he was told this, he started analyzing what he was listening to and found out how true it was. Every station he'd imagined to be local was produced to seem local. He took it hard. This was in Arizona, so the station he wanted to buy would ideally be a clod-stomping hick station with newscasts about chafing futures and dung prices. You know. Cowboy stuff.
Knowing that his beloved country stations were made in California was an insult to him. Ironic.

Anyway.

I've been putting together a website and come to the sad realization that the majority of websites are from pre-existing templates. Not what I'd imagined at all.
A website is a neat little personal thing that someone can do I'd imagined that there would be great diversity of websites just as there are a diversity of web-surfer. Not the case. Websites can be lumped into some basic categories with 'content' dumped in afterward. Impressively, you don't realize at first how similar template sites are. At the same time, realize that no matter what site you go to, you seem to instinctively know how to navigate around. This isn't a coincidence. It's because the Internet has been around long enough for people to know what 'works' for ease of access and then create websites accordingly. In a way, it's become a science.
A few years ago, that wasn't the case. When you visited a new site, you'd have to take a few seconds to find all the navigation buttons, and realize where the sites core information was. It wasn't a case of simply glancing at the general layout and knowing where to go.
My site will be a bit more old-school. I want it to look different.