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How Not To Steal A Site Design

Posted on 05 Jul 2001

in News

by Martin Burns (MartinB)

Rated 3.68 (Ratings: 6)

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Martin Burns

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User since: 26 Apr 1999

Articles written: 143

Our good friends at Proxima Consulting

seem to have problems deciding what to put on their site. Poor lambs.

They also seem to have had problems with coming up with an effective

user experience.

So, in the best tradition of dumb people everywhere, they stole it. All.

Words, images, layout, sitemap down to a URL level. Everything.

Which would have been fine (in a 'not' sense) except that they stole

it from one of the better UK CED and SI agencies, Oyster

...who found it when one of their staff was doing some research last weekend. The

only changes Proxima had made seems to have been a crude

search and replace on the Oyster name, even claiming that Proxima

had merged with companies who had in fact merged with Oyster.

Since being called on it, Proxima have pulled the entire site beyond

the Flash intro. So skipping the intro means you also skip the entire

site. Nice.

Fortunately, Google has a cached copy. Here are a couple of samples:

Oyster took a copy of the offending site and contacted Proxima, which may explain the Proxima site disappearance. I hear that Oyster aren't going to sue... at the moment

Can you imagine being the person responsible, and the meeting held at Proxima to consider his or her future... Are they selling tickets?

Martin Burns has been doing this stuff since Netscape 1.0 days. Starting with the communication ends that online media support, he moved back through design, HTML and server-side code. Then he got into running the whole show. These days he's working for these people as a Project Manager, and still thinks (nearly 6 years on) it's a hell of a lot better than working for a dot-com. In his Copious Free Time™, he helps out running a Cloth Nappies online store.

Amongst his favourite things is ZopeDrupal, which he uses to run his personal site. He's starting to (re)gain a sneaking regard for ECMAscript since the arrival of unobtrusive scripting.

He's been a member of evolt.org since the very early days, a board member, a president, a writer and even contributed a modest amount of template code for the current site. Above all, he likes evolt.org to do things because it knowingly chooses to do so, rather than randomly stumbling into them. He's also one of the boys and girls who beervolts in the UK, although the arrival of small children in his life have knocked the frequency for 6.

Most likely to ask: Why would a client pay you to do that?

Least likely to ask: Why isn't that navigation frame in Flash?

The access keys for this page are: ALT (Control on a Mac) plus:

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