is it me or do people not even look at their own pages?
I'm looking around and these 'pimped' designs make some of these pages unreadable.
"oh, it is so cool how you made your text white against a white background'; 'oh neat how you put that photo player in your page that makes it wider than Rosanne (is she still heavy? if not pick someone else).

I kept my basic white and felt the pressure to put colors on it and such. roll over my links and the 'fuzz' out - what is that?

I think the point is people are supposed to look and at a minimum be able to digest the content of pages. Having them set to 10% opacity (if i lost you there you shouldn't be reading this in the first place) is ridiculous.

of course all of this may be since I'm 20 years over the average user. but it goes without saying "I remember a time when you could read a myspace page.", I once walked 15 miles uphill to read Mike Bobbit's blog (in the snow).