Hey, MWI got its website ripped off today! But they didn’t do a very good job. Now you might say “But these websites look almost nothing like each other!” True, they only bear minimal resemblance to each other now, and perhaps the sin is forgivable for that, but the design is a ripoff nonetheless. If you need proof, read on.
We have a stats package on our website that tracks referring websites. We were getting a ton of referral traffic from http://www.evolvsolutions.com today. When I visited the site I found out it was because they had copied our entire site, HTML code, links and all, and they had failed to change many of the links which meant they were still pointing back to our site. As they went around testing the site and finding the links to change they evidently clicked through to our site a lot, which caught my attention.
I’m not so concerned about them ripping off our site as I am that people will think we ripped off their site. Of course any designer could tell the original, but the lay people must be protected from this kind of fraud.
I don’t think this is exactly what Cameron was talking about in his article Good Designers Copy, Great Designers Steal.
