Blacklist gripes

[Ann Omness]

Personally, I like the consistency of templated sites when I'm reviewing submissions. As soon as the site comes up, I know where to look for my recip and I know where the ENTER link is. Saves me a lot of time. If a visitor thinks they've already seen the site and clicks back, well, that only hurts the webmaster who made the site, not me. It's my own opinion that surfers like templated sites for the same reason I do - they're easier to navigate because they're familiar.

I have to confess to wondering if other links list owners ban templated sites just to slow the webmasters down. I've never gotten a complaint from a visitor about templated sites on the list.

If you're going to use templates though, you really should take a couple of weeks and just design a good assortment of templates to cycle through. A lot of webmasters just use the default templates that come with the script, so we end up with 50 different webmasters submitting sites that look almost identical because they all bought the same script.