Smashing Magazine, an awesome online resource for Web developers, posted a story on online newspaper design trends. Visit enough of these domains and you soon get a feeling of déjà vu.

Smashing lists them:

1. Color schemes - Most news sites use a white background with dark (black) text and blue links.
2. Header and sidebar banners - Lots of ads in these places.
3. Top navigation - Aside the New York Times, many news sites embrace top navigation.
4. Tabbed content areas - Cram lots of information in a small space.
5. Grid-based layouts - A good way to “manage and organize a large amount of content.”

Visit enough of these domains you and you soon get a feeling of déjà vu. Didn’t I just write that?

Lots of big new organizations of all stripes use templating in their designs. It saves time and probably makes supporting these sites from corporate HQ a lot easier. As things become more centralized and budgets leaner, these standard designs probably save money, too. Why spend months on a redesign when you need to focus all your resources on being able to report?

Advance Internet’s recently redesigned templates for Cleveland.com, OregonLive.com, MLive.com and Syracuse.com. Cleveland.com uses a hybrid of the new template, old template and a third blogging template for some story commenting. It’s rather confusing.

Gannett’s templates for Indianapolis Star, CentralOhio.com, Montgomery Advertiser and Cincinnati.com. Gannett launched these earlier this year, with the design originating from the Indy Star. Apparently the redesigns have caused a lot of turmoil. These templates, very much to their credit, push social media sharing high up on the front page.

Community newspaper powerhouse Gatehouse uses a similar set of templates on many of its 518 newspaper sites. Some are like my former employer’s site, while others are a variation of the Wicked Local brand, and yet others deliver news to the beat of a different template. All seem to have a gradient with a little bit of a drop shadow on each side of the content area.

Fox television stations that use the Fox Interactive Web template look EXACTLY the same. It’s not even worth posting more examples. Just take out “Cleveland” logo and insert “Tampa Bay” or “Twin Cities.” The templates boasts plenty of bevels, shadows and gradients, all in a red, white and blue theme. Very LOUD! I credit the Fox designs for not pimping out the 10 o’clock anchor team that no one cares about.

Smashing also compares blogs to traditional news sites. Blogs, as you would imagine, do a better job of integrating social networking, vital in the battle to turn readers into users, and users into members of an online community. I think more news sites should work like blogs. It’s already starting to trend in this direction — just a matter of getting those darn publishers to give in.

The Financial Times made its new site more like a blog with a vertical news flow called “the river”. FT also ported over the salmon color of its printed paper. Some things never change.

I would love to find designs that break out of the mold. Traditional news sources are unlikely to do this, though. Years of instituational behavior, coupled with taking themselves too seriously, mean few Web news sources are going to deviate much from the norm. Visit enough of these domains and you soon get a feeling of déjà vu.