I like to keep up with what’s going on in the design world. I think it’s important that you never rest on your laurels and keep pushing yourself to learn (and achieve) more. As a result, like most ‘techies’ I have lots of rss feeds that I subscribe to, and I spend more than a little time reading up on what’s going on in the design world. And I have to be honest, most of the time I enjoy it.

But one thing I do find irritating is that things are becoming recycled more and more often, and bucking the trend; I don’t think it’s that much of a good thing. The advent of WordPress and other blogging platforms have made it incredibly easy for people to reference sites from around the globe, all with the intent of increasing the hits on their own site. This is all well and good, it’s a digital version of what many of us had to do endlessly at school/college/university. Referencing is one thing, but simply pasting a link on your own site to get ‘drive-thru’ traffic is becoming increasingly (annoyingly) fashionable.

As a result, you can potentially visit a host of websites and find the same content (allbeit dressed in new clothes, though sometimes it’s just a link back to the original site) over and over again. These tend to be along the lines ‘25 best template designs EVER!’ ‘101 inspirational websites’ and suchlike.

Don’t get me wrong, I like to view these sorts of posts as much as the next designer, it’s just that sometimes, it feels like a cheap trick to ‘fatten up’ their site, without really investing some time in the content of the site themselves. We all want to improve ourselves – it’s why we visit the sites in the first place. It’s just that dumping a link in a post makes the journey longer, not any more worthwhile.