Website design originality?

How important is site design originality?

Think about it a bit before you say "a lot, original is good" though. If you've ever had to design a site (which I bet is a lot of us here), you probably know how hard it is to come up with a design that is functionally effective, visually pleasing, AND significantly original. I mean, things like left-menu-bars, top banners, and latest-content running down the center aren't on most webpages because everyone's flat-out unoriginal. It's because elements like those follow simple design rules, deliver info quick and naturally, make the site look clean and orderly, stuff like that. I'm sure everyone has seen those very original sites that had a menu on the bottom-right of the page or some other weird layout and after staring at the site and figuring out what to do 20 seconds later you're like "wtf???!? what an annoying site!!"

The reason I'm asking is because I just found the 2advanced site, and I've been taking a lot of design elements from there in a site I'm making. In fact, my layout is starting to look painfully similar to 2advanced, which has started to gnaw on my originality conscience. I've realized that making a site that's original and still functionally and visually effective takes more work than I imagined.

Thoughts on this?

A couple of thoughts...

1) If your site looks too much like another then you're walking a fine line. You could be sued for copyright infingement.

2) Design depends on target viewer, you can't have an original and exciting design all the time. Some sites don't lend themselves to anything but standard layout, while others need more impressive looks.

3) Yes, original does take effort. This is why many people turn to Flash, it gives them more scope than HTML + JS + CSS (though it bugs just about everyone when they open a site and have no choice but to see a flash intro).

4) The design concept is a difficult one to come up with. I try to think of not what can be done, but what would be nice and would look good. So for example:

http://www.northern-navigators.co.uk/a-moss/

is a site that I am currently working on, my original concept was an industrial future look, the inspiration being films such as 'aliens','the matrix'... This is what I came up with.

5) Sometimes wierd layout achieves the goal of being noticed. But it has to be wierd in a 'I am being wierd on purpose' way.

well i can say that i'll be entering into the realm quite soon as a couple of freinds and i are starting a web design company.

binky is right with alot of it...

if you design a site for a company and then they notice their site looks alot like another site (whether you did the other site or ripped it doesn't matter) you probably just lost a client.

but really this is what a client is paying for....their site to be different. eye catching....and so on...

they aren't paying for a cookie cutter site (unless they decide thay don't want to pay the money for a premium site and decide to go with a "template" site)...but you get my drift on that....

as far as ripping components of other sites...well that's a completely different animal...so i guess you have to word it differently...layout vs content(components)

i mean i could layout a site and use someone elses components changing colors, fonts, etc...and no one would know...but if you notice there's alot of the same things going on...because there's only so much that can be done...i mean if i use the same connection script in php to connect to a db that someone else uses...where's the harm in that? or i use a free .fla file (edit it of course to change a few things) is that wrong...which applies to javascript and stuff (cuz face not everyone is guru and we non-guru's need help)

but i gotta roll....it's the weekend and it just hit 5pm....i think i made a point though....didn't i?

There are a couple of factors to be considered when designing a site.

First, and most important in my opinion, is whether a visitor can navigate the site. It might be nice to add lots of bells and whistles but if the site can't be navigated the user will move on.

It's also important to pay attention to download times. Graphics add to the time it takes to load a page. Keep in mind, there's still a large segment of the population using a 56K (or slower) connection.

This is also true of browsers. Not everyone is using the latest IE browser. And putting a note on a page asking visitors to upgrade to the latest browser will generate more hate mail than you can imagine.