I’m prepared for complaints, rants, bitching, and anything else that may be caused as a result of this post. But before that happens, hear me out. I even went out of my way to blur the site names on the header. The sites in the thumbnails above are just prime examples of my rant. Of course, there’s plenty more out there.

For years, I’ve always stumbled upon these types of sites. I don’t even know what to categorize them as anymore, since MySpace is dead. My point is.. These sites suck.

• All of these websites serve the same purpose: FREE RESOURCES, HOLLA! All of them provides downloadable brushes, patterns, textures, vectors, “layouts”, “headers”, and all of that junk. Not to mention, most of these resources are probably stolen off from each other. I remember seeing multiple websites giving the same Hollister brush. All of them basically say the same thing, “Do not steal/jock/redistribute”. Obviously, someone is “stealing” and redistributing these resources. I’m not saying that everyone is not legit with their work, but there are those out there who aren’t playing fair.
• All of these websites look the same. Have you noticed that these sites in general usually have 3 columns? Thousands of affiliates? That obnoxious header with the multiple pastes of some sort of figure? Large sub-headers with small body text? Don’t forget about the fade brush-out borders! I think it’s hard to believe how many of these sites claims that everything is 100% made by them with the fact that they all look alike. I’m not accusing them of being unoriginal… Actually, wait.. I am!
• Their chat boxes… Mostly contains crap like, “AFFIES PLEASE?!” or “AFFIE SWEEP PASSED.” The term, Affiliate is misused in most cases here. It’s practically advertisement that is masked under the name of affiliate, if you don’t have my link on your site, I’m removing your link from my site. So much for a contact form; more personal matters can be discussed privately. I’m just saying- these sites are using each other for free advertisement, through the means of a chat box. Isn’t a chat box supposed to be used for.. Chats like, “Hey, name (more like affie)! It’s been a while, I love your new brushes here. Thank you for sharing ” or something close.
• These site’s inspiration came from another site… That looks exactly the same. An inspiration isn’t a free ticket to copy another person’s layout entirely. An inspiration should be used as a motivation in creating your site. At least if you’re going to copy something, make it less obvious. Don’t copy everything word for word and just change the colors and some other minor things. Talk about “Don’t jock/copy/redistribute”..
• Many of these sites have the same concept when it comes to coming up with names. One of the most common example is repeating the last letter of the word twice. Such as, Firee, Icee, Deliciouss, Extravagancee, Vaguee, Roguee, Laughh, Smilee, Cutee, Intoxicatedd, Luxuryy, and etc. I do have to admit, some of these sites have pretty nice names, but it’s gone to waste with these crapped up sites.
• Automatically playing music when these sites are opened? It’s a horrible feature on the site, no one wants to hear music coming out of your site. If I wanted to listen to music, I would just open up iTunes or Pandora. There’s no use of having music automatically playing on these sites. What sucks even more is when the site owner purposely hides the “pause/stop” button on the music player. Are you serious?! Sometimes, the music that is being played can be really annoying. Remember, not everyone likes the same type of music that you listen to. I love house music, but the person next door doesn’t.
• These sites aren’t usually long-lived. But there’s hundreds of them on the web. Basically, the owner of these websites updates multiple times per day/week in groups. But within a couple of months, these sites becomes inactive. I don’t have a solid reason why, but there’s several factors that leads up, including:
• Running out of ideas from outdoing themselves at the beginning. There’s no steady pace!
• It became boring…
• Unable to juggle between updating and life.
• There’s no more resources to steal.
• Forgetting that the site existed in the first place.
• A lot of these sites have no sense in coloring. How much more obnoxious can a bright lime green background be with white body text? That’s not cute, that’s just stupid because almost no one can read what the text is saying without zooming in or highlighting the text. Same goes with the font size; making everything small doesn’t help either. Compacting everything together isn’t cool.

At this point, there’s probably not much to rant about anymore. I made my point by ranting about how these sites suck, and there’s nothing else to it along with the fact that they are all similar to one another. Hope you enjoyed this post, because if you didn’t… It’s because you’re the owner of one of those sites I’m ranting about.. Or at least friends with them. That’s the truth, unfortunately. Also, a last sentence shout out to Kelsey & Aashni for the little key push into making this post. ;D