Design blog

Web design rip offs. Flattering or despicable?

It has happened to me a few times in the past. A friend or old work colleague sends you an email or IM “check out this link… somebody’s ripped off your site”. The most recent being a ripoff of a website I designed while working for Chaos Design in Guildford earlier this year. My original design is www.estrelasantiago.com. Today somebody sent me a link to this site: http://copyright-budva.com. I was amazed that it wasn’t even a half hearted copy, they had actually just cloned the site and dropped their content in. They had even left the CSS untouched, to the extent of leaving in my name and copyright information at the top of the CSS. I mean how lazy is that!

Bev, who informed me of the cloned website, said “You should be flattered, that somebody wanted to copy your design”. I was thinking about this and I guess I am a little flattered and not really that angry about it. The problem arises when somebody else spots the copied design and points out that the original site that you designed is in-fact the copy!! This happened to me a few months ago when I noticed that a company in Guildford (who have since taken down the site) had ripped off one of my designs www.charcol.co.uk. An old work colleague thought that the coincidence that the company that copied my design was based in Guildford which is very close to where I live now and I was half accused as being the perpetrator. This made me more angry than anything, So I rang them and had a good rant. They took the site down the next day and even phoned up my old company to apologise.

I don’t know how these people sleep at night knowing that they have ripped off designs like this. I mean I feel bad even if my designs hint at other designs or are too similar to something else.

There is a great tool for checking that your website hasn’t been ripped off. Visit www.copyscape.com and type your URL in and it’ll check if other sites on the web have similar text to yours.

In answer to your question Matt, this is obviously ‘despicable’.

What is going on here is theft. If they wanted a site like the one you designed they should be contacting you to ask if they can have another similar one designed, or at least if they could license the design from you.

It makes me laugh how they completely cut-and-pasted the site though, not even taking the time to change the original author’s name! This is bad for you too, since it incorrectly associates you with their site, which could contain content you disagree with or simply just look shit or be coded badly and harm your reputation.

I say contact them directly and tell them to take it down or else.

If they have taken your site lock-stock-and-barrel, you can also report them to google (webmaster tools) as they will be duplicating your meta data etc, which can affect search results.

It is best to send an C&D;email / letter straight away. Also report them to their hoste, and if they are running Ads, to the Ad companies.

Thanks for the advice Sonix. I will report them to Google using the webmaster tools.

I had an email from them today. They are sorry and they are going to completly redesign their website.

Hi Matt

Thats great! Actually, when we come down to it, as soon as ‘somebody is busted’ found out, they usually do the right thing, without too much delay and bother as nobody really wants to be caught out.

Cheers