It’s a dog eat dog world out here in the web design world and lots of time is spent checking out the competition, especially sites that outrank you in the SERP’s. Yesterday I was checking my ranking on a search term and came across Aetomic. When I landed on the site I immediately thought, “Self, I’ve seen this site before but not this site.” So then I looked at my backlinks for my blog and came across Inspiration Bit and the lightbulb went off.
Can you call yourself a web designer if you aren’t even designing your own website? Can you then put a page up and take away the credit from the person who actually designed the theme you’re using? It’s bad enough that Aetomic is using a theme someone else designed to sell their web design services but it’s another thing to take credit for the design of the site by omitting the credit of the person who actually designed the theme. In my opinion this is a deceptive practice and makes me wonder how many other designs they pass off as their own and how many web designers are getting ripped off by this company.
Of course maybe I’m looking at this wrong. Maybe I should be downloading free themes, stripping the author credit and pass the design off as my own. It would save me a lot of work and obviously increase my profit margin. However, it wouldn’t put me in a favorable light among my peers.
My name’s Jen; I’m a cynical, sarcastic, ex-drummer who is fond of dark humor. I've held way too many factory & retail jobs but finally found my calling one Christmas holiday in a dark, musty basement. I am now a CSS & XHTML web standards looney and can be found daily—when I’m not at my Mac—at the local fair-trade coffee shop buying an iced-soy mocha no matter the temperature.
I am also the owner of Pop Stalin Design specializing in CSS & XHTML web design as well as custom WordPress themes.
This is an unusual one, because whilst the first design has definitely been inspired by the second, it also goes a long way to identify itself as unique, with many new visual features and alterations. But to answer your question I don’t believe a designer is a designer if he/she simply rips off other folks work. It shows a lack of talent, imagination and ultimately is just plain unethical.
Was it a matter of ripping off someone elses site, or a matter of them both purchasing the same template?
I am a developer myself, and though, my site has be designed not purchased, there are many design companies that will purchase a template or have someone else do it. Why would you ask?? time.
We have steady flow of work here, and i know there have been times and still are, when i have no time at all to update the site. We are more focused on our clients sites.
Yes, I agree that a design firm should be designing their own site, if in fact they are promoting web design, but at the same time, it is the service and end product they are selling for each individual client, not their own site design.
just my two cents
thanks for allowing comments
@ Steve: Would you say that since the company made an attemp at making it unique that it’s okay to not give credit to the original designer?
@Tec: This is a case of using a free Wordpress Template and modifying it. This template wasn’t purchased.
I’m aware that folks out there purchase templates for their sites and you can often see from their portfolio the talent gap, for lack of a better term, in the design of their clients’ sites and their own.
I guess the issue I have with this is that they didn’t give the original designer of the template the credit he deserves. It was his idea that this site is based on and in my opinion that’s theft. Just because they made some changes doesn’t change the fact that the basic structure of the original template is intact and therefore not their own.
P.S. Your portfolio gallery completely comes apart on Mac in Firefox.
Perhaps not Jen. You’re probably right, and I’d be unhappy with Aetomic (or anyone else) if they’d obviously copied in this way from me. I guess to me this is just not what I’d call your typical rip off.
Nope, you’re right, it’s a whole different kind of rip-off!