Years ago, when my wife and I used to go to the movies in Yonkers, we noticed that most of the teenage girls dressed alike. Big blond hair, high heels, you get the idea.

What I couldn’t understand was–who was their hero? Who did they look to to decide what was right and what wasn’t right? It’s easy to see kids that are trying to emulate a particular rapper, say, or career women trying to be Audrey Hepburn. But who was their role model?

After a few years, I figured it out… Barbie. As in the doll.

All a long way of pointing out that while great websites are fairly different (compare Google with Yahoo), most bad websites are sort of the same. And I have no idea what the role model is, but there are plenty of places you can go to get all the building blocks you need.

It matters a lot what your website looks like. If you can use cookie cutter tools and end up with one that looks like something on MySpace, you should probably start over.