You absolutely must CONFORM to these rules when building a web site.

• Make your logo with a basic font. Don’t use capital letters.
• Be sure to use tons of three dimensional icons.
• Use rounded corners. There are no square boxes allowed at all.
• Don’t make your own tools at all, grab widgets from other sites and just cut and paste the code into your site. Be sure to also use the buzzword “widget” a lot.
• Speaking of buzzwords, use the words “web 2.0″ and “blog” a lot even though your site may have nothing to do with either.
• Have somebody do a caricature of your face or entire body. Put this caricature next to your site name.
• If you are posting a picture in your article, make it look like it was torn out of a book.
• Navigation menu’s go on the right now. Alternately you may have a menu along the top but you must use tabs.
• Use Ajax, and lots of it, even where it’s unnecessary.
• All your link names must reflect the name of the page. (example: Title is “How to Buy a Car”, link would be http://sitename.com/how_to_buy_a_car.html)
• Articles and posts must be in a straight row on the main page.
• Don’t have a Link List page at all. God forbid you share the links you like on a regular page. If you must share links, you have to share them within your posts.
• Don’t be creative or give your web site your own flavor at all. Just do what everybody else is doing and make a boring site just like the rest of them. Then you can sit back and be glad you’re part of the web 2.0 buzz.

For those of you that haven’t caught on, yes, I am using sarcasm to tell the story about how every web site these days are alike. Even I have fallen victim to following the same rules everybody else is following. How about not conforming for once? How about doing your own thing and making a site for yourself and not just doing what everybody else is doing?