I’m being lazy.

RIP Michael and Farrah.

I decided to post a few sites that are original and beautifully designed. They are all blog and resource sites that I think should be shared. I’ve come across sites that have beautiful headers but these sites put effort into the entire site. I don’t know about the rest of you but I’m a very visual person and I love coming across sites that make you wonder how they thought of that. So here are 5 sites that put a lot of effort into the entire site:

Artistique Ilustra- a beautifully done vector layout with a touch of flash. Aileen is a very talented artist, just take a look at her artwork. 

Amourchaleur- an amazing layout, vector meets kawaii with her own personal touch. Dayna has some wonderful wallpapers that make me jealous.

Lastsong- one of the sites that has the less is more touch to it but amazing all the same. The little touches on this site pulls it all together.

Ishiwong- a very colorful layout where grungy merges with pastel. Amy offers some eye popping web layouts.

Tiramisyu- Wendy’s layout has a nice texture with a splash of color and hey if you don’t like the current color you can change it. She added a nice slider effect to the top navigation that I find my self playing ‘catch up with the hand’.

I actually had six but one was in maintainance mode and I wasn’t going to direct people to a site in the middle of a change. While on this subject, if you are using the ‘maintainance mode’ plugin you should check out ‘theme test drive‘ plugin. You can work on your new theme and only you will see it, while visitors still see your current theme.

Go check out these sites, you may like a few or even get inspired.

After browsing through sites like blogs, createblog and resource sites, I’ve noticed that people are just doing the same thing over and over. What happened to being original? Here are a few examples from create blog, this, this, this and this. There are a lot more just like them but I only picked a few. Do you see how they have the same faded look with a couple of color dots. Now, these are good but just because it’s good doesn’t mean you should use it on everything.  If you see people using the same technique a lot then you might want to try something else. It’s over done.

Here are some example of backgrounds that are over done; this, this and this. And yes, that last example is mine. These examples are older but people are still making them. The same colors, stripes, big circles and the same random brushes plopped on a background. I was actually amazed when I went through createblog and only found a few of them but they still run rampant on resource sites.

Photoshop and Paintshop Pro can do amazing things, the effects are endless so why not try them out. Instead of using the same tutorial as everyone else from the same site (I won’t mention names), type Photoshop tutorials into google and see what pops up. I’ve been using Photoshop for awhile and I probably don’t even know a third of what it can do. Half of the things I’ve learned was just by messing around and the other half is from tutorials on multiple sites.

I’m posting this because I’m hoping this will give some people a kick in a different direction. Be creative, different even if a lot of people don’t like it. I guarantee you someone will and pretty soon people will copy it and it too will be over done.