CMS cliche

A CMS site that uses the CMS cliches is ugly. I'm sorry.

I've seen enough rounded corners, bubbley buttons, gradients, large fonts, orange and blue and lime green layouts to last me a lifetime.

Bottom line: if it's a preset. if it's easy to do. if you kept the style that way because the template was made that way... it's going to look dated soon and everyone will know it was made easily with CMS.

This is also sometimes referred to as a web 2.0 style.

Here's an image someone created to demonstrate some of the most over-used graphics of CMS.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Web_2.0_style_example.png