- Unshamed -

The owner has explained himself in his comment and has gracefully removed the site for now. We applaud him for his willingness to admit his mistake and rectify the wrong. We look forward to his new site.

Two more new copycats found running in the wild. Thanks to our visitors for letting us know.

Copycat No 1: Site taken down as the owner gracefully explained his situation to us. All the best Dan.

This one is the ultimate, Copycat No 2: Taken down but we are getting very tired of hearing the same old “I’m just trying out the CSS…” or “I’m learning how to build tabless website” story.

Seriously, if you bother to change the graphic and text, I’m sure you can put in some effort to change the look and feel of it. Or put a big text that says “Training Session - rightful owner, thepixelage” and don’t put them under your actual domain name!

Have you ever imagine how it is going to look like if our prospective client where to stumble upon your website first? We will end up being accused of stealing someone else’s design.

This is not a joking matter. Do keep in mind that this website is a business website, not a personal website. So if you want to learn CSS or learn how to build a website, take some effort to at least make it look like you are doing that.

- Unshamed -

The designer has contacted us explaining that that whole thing is a misunderstanding and that he meant it only as a practice site with no intention of selling it to a real client.

We have removed the original content of this post because the designer has finally decided to redesign his client’s site with his own design, even though we have not gotten any apology from the designer for copying our site design in the first place. Our intention in fingering copycats on this blog is never to humiliate the designers. Rather, we hope to make them realise that they cannot get away with simply ripping off someone else’s designs, and that they should respect others’ works and learn to love their own. Getting inspired by someone else’s work is one thing; simply ripping it off is quite another.

It is a real big surprise to find out that someone has stolen our design. I don’t know if we should be happy, angry or sad. I mean, it does not only look similar, the background image, the header, the keywords and even the CSS file were the exact same ones ripped from ours!

Exhibit A: Spina Marketing (http://www.spinamarketing.com/index_1.html)
We were informed by our visitors that they have changed their URL to (http://www.spinamarketing.com/index_new.html). Well consider changing the design!

The design they have ripped is our design for our old site:

Exhibit B: http://old.thepixelage.com

While we might get inspired by other people’s designs, simply ripping off others’ works is way too low to go! Much worse when the culprit happens to claim to be a WEB DESIGN COMPANY! If things get too desperate and you sorely need to rip off a design, I’d think at least the smart way is to change parts and filenames. So imagine our horror when the CSS file was still named “thepixelage.css”. Classic. [Update: It seems they have now changed the filename of their CSS file to “spina_style.css”.]