Hey kids! You’re going to learn, step by step, how to steal a website today!  So you have your passion, but you’re just kinda lazy, and you need a clean new website, and you need it FAST.  What do you do?  Well, if you’re Marc McLaughlin Photography, you just boost one you like, gif for gif!  Here we go, step by step!

Step 1 (above): Just swipe everything you want. The work is already done! How cool is that? But first upload it so that it doesn’t come up publicly.  Something like index_test.html would work.  But wait… ohhhh no you didn’t!  Don’t click the original photographer’s hot links! You might get busted, like immediately.  Bummer!  Oh well.  But definitely don’t forget those bottom two corner gifs.  That could look kind of weird.

Step 2 (below):  Ok, you got all those pesky gifs.  Stupid original photographer could at least have a zip file on their website with all the files included so you wouldn’t have to go through all this. Now that it’s all together, let’s just throw it up as your public site.  Does it matter that it has someone else’s name and contact info?  Not really, because step three is going to go really quick!  Oh, and make sure to put a copyright statement under your new site.  You wouldn’t want anyone to steal any of your stuff now, would you?

Step 3:  Time to take care of pesky details, like the identity of the photographer you stole it from.  There, all better!  Deleting those went quick enough, so clients visiting your site will be all “Oh wow, he must be working on a new site, so exciting!”

Step 4: Make it legit! With all the extra time you saved not having to draw your own box in Photoshop, you can do just what Marc McLaughlin did and drop your name, phone and email on the old graphic and drop it right back in.  Don’t worry about fonts that clash, text that is too long, or whether your new menu overhangs the left of the beautiful, rounded-corner box you just took possession of.  Let’s hope your menu options mesh perfectly with what’s already been created, because that would be even MORE work!  Ugh!  Who wants that?  Besides, Arial is such a rare font to get a hold of, so let’s not mess with this too much.  Just shoehorn your business presentation into someone the structure of the one you stole from.  That’s way easier.

That’s it, 4 easy steps!  Now go out there and get what’s yours!  Ethics are for punks.

ETA: Ok, I feel the need to clarify what’s the big deal since this has gotten so much interest.  I’d like to address a couple of points that usually come up when things like this happen to other photographers and myself.

The first is that imitation is flattery.  Fine, but imitation is taking something you see and making your own and trying to make it better, not physically taking someone else’s work and passing it off as yours.  This is not a major infraction like stealing images is, but to me it’s symptomatic of a larger problem.  So many people think that if it’s on the internet and can be had, it’s theirs, and that’s just wrong and lazy.  Certainly my site is not the first white box nor will it be the last.  Mine is inspired from one of the numerous commercial portfolios out there.  But I made my own from ground up and for my purposes.  I didn’t swipe another photographer’s site code to make it.  It’s 100% mine.

The second thing that usually comes up is that the victim should take this to the person who stole privately.  Nonsense.  Know what comes of that?  Some excuse about “my web designer did it” (or other nonsense excuses) and/or defensiveness and/or varying degrees of compliance, and of course sometimes even shifting blame in the other direction.  Nobody calls or emails me privately before they publicly jack my site, so I feel no duty to offer the same courtesy.  Yes it happens a lot and no, nothing you can do to stop it, but I’m not going to ignore it.  I’m even going to have a little fun with it.  :)

When you lift a site template for your own use, HTML, graphics and all, take a few extra minutes to cover your tracks so it takes a little longer than a few days to be found out.  Really, folks, put a little more effort in your unethical behavior (well, behaviour in this instance).

Ok!  So, back in September I was tipped off that Side Dish Designs basically swiped the shell of my site for their use.  See my original post here if you missed it.  

Now I have someone from Serbia, Spectacular Inc., claiming to have designed my site for me.  I’d guess that most, if not all of the sites presented on Spectacular Inc’s site are just screen grabs.  For grins, go to the about page and read about their “effective well thought out approach, while pushing the boundaries of online experience.”  I don’t think using a desktop background graphic as your site background is really pushing any boundaries.

Actually, in this case, imitation is just plain laziness.  It’s ironic that Side Dish Designs is a design and web firm, but can’t be bothered to generate and code their own site.  Ok, so this isn’t nearly as bad as other cases where sites and work have been appropriated by people scouring the net looking for web designs.  It’s a white box, I get it.  But at least make it a little different!  Make it a little bigger/smaller and with your own supporting images and your own code!  There are lots of white boxes out there, but this particular one, should anyone care to look at the source code of both sites, is my white box, made by me and my friend Photoshop.  When I set out on this current design, I had gotten quotes from several developers, and the timeline was going to be very close to when I needed it.  And anyone who has worked with creatives knows timelines are a moving target, so I decided to do it myself.

Here is my site as it has looked for a couple of years now.

It’s identical in every way to my site, right down to the pixel dimensions, save for the actual content.

What’s more, if you go to Side Dish Design’s “About” page, you are treated to some very compelling reasons as to why you should hire them, things like “Having a career new media at Sony Music, I have the experience needed to evaluate your situation and make sure all the bases are covered. It also keeps me up to date with new ideas I can bring to the table. With the web at our fingertips and a plethora of information available, I love to find and use solutions that cost little to no money but fit perfectly in the project. It’s about using good tools; not dishing out more dough.”  Quite a contradiction, wouldn’t you say, unless you consider wholesale copying of web code to be the sort of “new ideas” that are brought to the table.  Now it’s easy to see what they mean by “find and use solutions that cost little to no money…”  

One thing I worked a lot on was the full integration of my blog into my website.  I never liked having to leave a photographer’s website to see their blog.  I always thought it should be consistent across the board.  With that in mind, I set out on integrating one of my favorite templates into my blog.  It took quite a lot of effort considering I don’t know the first thing about web design or CSS, but I eventually was able to make it work.  It would seem from Side Dish Design’s blog page that they thought it was a good idea, too, but for some reason, these web designers just couldn’t put it together very well.  How to tackle the problem?  I guess for a web designer, it means shoving the blog into an iframe (iframe rhymes with lame, by the way).  I can’t say I wasn’t tempted to do so myself after fighting with my blog template, but I’m very particular about things, and I’d rather have it right or not at all than use some awful implementation like an iframe.

This doesn’t bother me as much as it would were I not in the process of a completely new design.  It’s just a shame that someone that calls themselves a web designer can’t design their own basic site.  It really makes you wonder if the designs they push in their portfolio are really theirs.  It at least calls it into question I would think.  I understand someone looking at other sites for inspiration and such, but I can’t understand a designer swiping actual code and supporting images to do their web design.  Where’s your pride in your work?  Where’s your passion for design?  This is a great lesson that in what happens when you try to make something that wasn’t designed for your purpose work for something else.  It falls flat.  It’s a compromise at best.

I guess if you need your website designed, why not cut the middle-man out and contact me directly?  LOL.  Thanks to the person that gave me the heads-up on this!