OK i used to be a web designer. My question is this: with broadband main thing now and the technoligy and tools, why are web sites so bad these days? Theya re all the same! If they do have animation, it is crap, and anything that tries to look cool, well, it usually looks like they are trying to look cool, not succeeding. There aresome really good ones of course, but what gives?

If you could give some examples, it might help. But be that as it may, I'd hazard a guess that many web designers have gotten lazy. When I mean web designers, I'm including note only the actual developers but the corporate bosses too.

Most corporate types don't know anything about technology nor graphic arts. Hence they may tell they're web people, "Make our site look like theirs because I like it." Or the web people become too reliant on templates and don't expand on what they have. I do remember seeing a site for certification training; they stole the entire site design from CNN.

Mostly I'd just chalk it up to laziness though. It's much easier to get something out the door if it doesn't take a lot of work to make it "good enough".

Well, if you talk about serious sites and not personal ones etc i think its because of the use of templates, and as you said it's eveident that tehy want to look cool, and that is not cool.
Excesive animations, music, websites made only with a big flash file, etc is modern but uggly.

Well from what i have been reading the plain websites tend to get more return visits.. So I think if you want to go extreme best to border on the realm of plain.. I tried to do that with this layout. http://b1st.us

Believe it or not, Ugly sites make more revenue, its a proven theory.

On a second note, these days you can't just pop up a website and be good to go, you'll never be found, so noone will pump money into a site, unitl ready to do so.

When I said plain some might take that as ugly.. I mean plain like as in yahoo.com they have alot on one page but it is easy to nav.