When you're designing it can be great to have a vision for a particular look and feel and sometimes technology such as having that work for a range of screen sizes and devices can feel like it's getting in the way, but at the end of the day it's like Corrosive says, you design to facilitate the delivery of content and messages. Your role as a designer is to make that as smooth and seemless as possible really, for anybody viewing the website.
Standards and frameworks can make a lot of websites samey. But I think visual trends are as much to blame here.
For example the the recent trend of flat design and flat colours.
There's no reason you can't have nice gradients or a radically different look using Bootstrap or other framework - it's just the big banner, flat and bold/simple design, flat icons and light colours etc. are popular at the moment, and a lot of people seem to want to go for that "modern" look.
I think our website looks fairly old school because of the smaller fonts, gradients, lack of big bold icons and so forth - but it could be built on Boostrap fairly easily (and I'm considering that at the moment given these recent changes by Google).
You've also got Wordpress, Drupal and other CMS based sites that work across devices. Again, Wordpress sites can look pretty samey, but they don't have to.
I think yeovalley.co.uk is a good example.
Works on most devices it seems, runs on Wordpress, and looks modern but pretty different with the scrapbook aesthetic.
It arguably looks a bit old school I guess.
Not as modern/lightweight or flash as a good Bootstrap site, but I guess that's the point, you can have quite a different look but still have a responsive website. It maybe just takes a bit more work - or the desire in the first place.
What do you guys think?