What is it about the word "Free" that turns us all into mindless, zombies at its mere mention?

Case in point, we are feverishly working on the relaunch of one of our clients onto our OPENAssociations platform.  It involves a ton of moving parts including installation of a new database, data migration to this new database, and single sign-on integration between multiple applications.  But the most daunting task, because it involves a little creativity and lots of hard work, is the development of a new design for the site. Since I have been through this many times, I know that the best designs take lots of time to develop, test, tweak, deploy, gather feedback, rinse, repeat, etcetera...

So why is it that I was drawn to a recent post that highlighted 35 Excellent Websites for Downloading Free CSS Templates?  Was it the word Free?  Was it the thought that a couple minutes of idle browsing would replace hours of thankless design and development work?  Yes, of course that was the appeal.  Free and Easy was the thought swirling through my head.

But alas, like everything labeled as Free, I just wound up wasting 10 minutes of clicking through a whole host of interesting designs, none of which would work at all for my project at hand.

So if you have a few "Free" moments, take a quick peek. For me, it is back to the drawing board.

Brett