Ronnie Garcia's web design of his personal website.

Design stolen exactly how it looks like, mainly just minor color changes

Now as of current blog press time, there is another website stealing his design, depending on the time you read this, you may probably not see the same design if they decided to change their design. But as time of writing, this German website Webteque.de just copied the site almost exactly the same.
 

Webteque.de, the Web Design Copycat Stealer

Even the minute web design elements on the page, all the same

Check the calendar date of the last article.

Copied calendar date on latest articles

The menu, contact form, headers, subheaders, breadcrumb, links, sitemap link, all the same.

Comparison of Ronniesan.com and WebTeque.de

Take a closer look at the stolen web design, check the links

List of links on Ronnie Garcia's Site and on Webteque.de

WTF, *LOL*, he copied the exact same links. Clearly, this is not how to steal someones web design. Actually that is how he found out, the links were aside from being popular web design related pages, they were also linking out to friends. And one of them, Usability Expert Jegan Chen pointed this out saying he noticed WebTeque.de linking to him and appeared in his referer logs. It was Jegan that told Ronnie about it.

Try to appear more legitimate with an older copyright year.

WebTeque.de's old copyright date with a new copied design.

He just stole the web design and is not yet finished, and claims to have a copyright on it since 2008. Well just for the benefit of the doubt, you can say the copyright was for the content and not for the design.

Inspiration or Stealing?

I had my share of active web designing days from 1997 to 2006, today I do more SEO work now and with some occassional web design and development side projects and I guess many web designers have looked at other websites for “inspiration” where you take a few things here and there, but never have I did a straight out copy of everything and just modify the code. To me that is stealing already, but of course this is my opinion and I know this is a debatable issue. Some can say the Internet is free, the source is free, whatever, but I think in design, there is a clear distinction between a stolen copy of a design and a design inspired from some other design. What do you think?

Now check this enhanced checkbox using CSS and Javascript. It looks better.

Impressed? But how was this possible?

I stumbled upon this page on the Internet showing how you can change the boring checkbox into an exciting one. What’s great about this is that you no longer have to change your existing code. By embedding this code, you can easily customize the look of the checkboxes any way you want.

<script type=”text/javascript” src=”checkbox.js”></script>

Don’t you think that this is simply amazing? You can’t do this with plain HTML but with the use of a simple code, you can now make your checkboxes look better and exciting.

This custom checkbox is one of the examples of the importance of CSS. Most modern websites now use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), either full CSS or partial. Before CSS even existed, when we do major design updates we either change all the pages, taking so much time. But with CSS, work has become easier and faster.

In this industry, outsourcing is a common thing and with a large amount of comptitiveness in the web design market, many are trying to get as many projects they can, even without sufficient manpower in the company and just decide to outsource some of the work. Some people that may have in-house teams may even have too much in their hands and decide to just pass web designing to another company.

10 Sikreto ng Mayayayaman (10 Secrets of the Rich)

10 Sikreto ng Mayayayaman is a book about getting rich. And the makers of the book decided to market the book online. They decide to get the services of Sheeromedia, where the designer who came up with the concept design was Gail Dela Cruz. In her blog she presented the design concept she made:

The client and author of the book, Al Sembrano did not accept the design and had a full refund for the design. Mr. Sembrano still used the same design concept with only minor changes, and an image below is the final design used:

Only minor modifications. According to Gail Dela Cruz, all payments made were all refunded, and yet, the main design concept was still used. Latest updates on the the 10 Sikreto ng Mayayaman can be found on Gail Dela Cruz’ blog where she posted the text messages she received from Mr. Sembrano.

All about SEO All about SEO All about SEO All about SEO All about SEO All about SEO All about SEO

Then came the normal websites with all the basic stuff, and design started to evolve to what it is today. The topbar, sidebar, some header graphic, the footer, main content area, etc. Playing with all kind of navigation and folder tab type of navigation was also a hit at around 2000 onwards.

Today design seems to use white space very well. Not using plain background, use of faint gradients and good use of curves. Drop shadows and 3d icons and big white borders seem to be the design trends today. One good example of a web design of today’s trends is the website of MindComet Interactive Agency. I personally like their website because it has good use of curves and rounded corners. Good use of gradients, faint shadows and the aqua shine look and feel. Builds their site in tableless CSS. Although uses heavy flash with streaming media, the site still has enough text content to keep it searcheable. 3D icons give a nice touch and the color scheme is pretty consistent throughout the pages. Their site looks like a good example of the current Web 2.0 trends today. Highly interactive, good aesthetics and very functional.