Templates have been part of a web developer’s vocabulary for many years now. I am not going to get in to a ramble about the pros or cons of web templates, but I would like to know if any of you have observed what I am seeing more and more of. Let me explain… When I first started developing web sites it was extremely rare to find two sites that were identical in style and appearance. However, now it’s almost uncommon to find web sites that don’t look alike. As a web developer I strive to build upon my competitors designs. By no means do I copy their sites, but rather I build upon them with my own unique styles and additions. This by no means is a new technique, web designers and developers have been doing the same thing for years. This in part, explains why web site design tends to change every few years. While I understand how overall design concepts change it still doesn’t explain why different sites look identical.

The answer I found comes from templates and shopping carts. Most of you have heard of template monster a service that has pre-built web sites that consumers can purchase. More times then not a person who decides to use a template doesn’t have the skills to customize a web template thus, causing many people to have similar web sites. The shopping cart side of this is a little bit more interesting. If the shopping cart provider is large enough I can almost always know whose shopping cat it’s when I check out. For example, OS Commerce the number one used free shopping cart solution has a checkout page that looks similar in almost every store that will use it. I am sure many of you reading this post will agree, and it extended to other shopping cart solutions as well.

My question is fairly simple. Should a eCommerce shopping cart solution be unique to every store? Is it ok to have the same shell (at least in appearance) just as long as the functionality remains solid?

Shopping Cart Software