In the world of web design, nothing stings worse than when somebody else rips you off. But unfortunately, we're talking about technology and the Internet, and in this grand ol' age of openness, easy access, and millions upon millions of web pages, eventually somebody is going to do things that look similar to your accomplishments. It happens - whether with web design or some neat new AJAX functionality.
As designers and technologists, we accept that. Coming from a writing background, I've had the luxury of being plagiarized by a major city newszine in the past. It was a blatant rip-off - word-for-word something that I had recorded down while interviewing a media personality. When I brought it to the attention of the newszine, they we're automatically on their writer's side - typical big guy versus little guy battle. Luckily, however, my case was pretty airtight and I received an apology from the other writer and the magazine (a printed one at that).
In technology it's different. In technology, you expect a cool new AJAX technique to be uniquely yours for only a couple of months before someone else reverse engineers it. In web design - if your design is successful - you expect to see imitators somewhere down the line.
Even more than that, however, is the fact that technology is so fast and so many people are thinking, that two people can come with the same ideas independently of one another - that old idea of the morphogenetic field.
In the end, what stings worse than having your idea "ripped off" is being accused of doing the "ripping." We received an email yesterday from a gentleman who told us that we needed to rethink our web site design because our "ripping off" of another company was too evident. These accusations apparently come from somebody who is familiar with the other company, but not with ours, so automatically they point the accusatory finger in our direction.
I reviewed the other web site, and there are some similarities. However, I had never heard of the company originally; and I knew where our inspiration lied, so I wasn't all that concerned with this one person's emailed statements. In fact, I'm not even going to mention the other company's name, because I don't want anyone to think that we are accusing them of anything. That simply isn't the case.
The bottom line is that sometimes people do similar things as you, and you can't really get caught up in a battle over who did it first. Even if you did come up with your design first - or your piece of technology - if the other company is bigger than you, or more popular in certain circles, they'll get the benefit of the doubt, while you'll get the finger (so to speak). When that happens, try not to let it bother you. Focus your energy on making your business more successful. In fact, I'm writing this blog post in hopes that if any others run into the same issue that we have, they can just cite this and move on rather feel compelled to spend precious time on their own blog post to vent.
In the spirit of openness, however, I wanted to tell the tale of how our web site did get it's design.
Our domain had previously existed in two different places at times: overmortal.net and overmortal.info. The design that you see today is actually pretty much the original design from the company's inception in 2006. The colors, logo and logo placement, copy, navigation positioning and colors, footer, and sections are all almost exactly the same as they were in the beginning (the copy has been refreshed over time obviously). The biggest difference between the original web site and the current one is in the dimensionality. The original design was more flat with less depth.
When it was time for a redesign, we wanted to keep most of what we had and just update it slightly to be more appealing. We had a couple of in-house designers and a third-party user experience expert to draw on, which gave us the more "button" looking navigation - most often referred to as "web 2.0" styles. Originally, we tried to make the inline section blocks ("curious?," "web design," "programming," etc.) also adhere to this style, but the touch was a little too much. We decided just to make them dark block elements.
At a previous company that I worked for, we had a thin bar at the top of our web site, used for nothing more than an accent color. I liked the idea, since our web site was primarily white with blueish text. The accent bar added a nice splash of color. The problem was that it also often drew the attention of the viewer's eyes. We needed it to do more with it if we were going to have it there.
Our marketing guy was the first to chime in with the idea of putting our contact information up there. If it draws the eyes, let's make it easy for them to find our phone number. We later added the email link, since many people find emailing a company easier than just cold calling.
Marketing also took the ball and ran with the home page copy changes. That big blue background with our exclamation of making the web better, and our few bullet points came from a weekend reading of some usability and social design books - the tech equivalent of a musical hook.
The "work with us" and "learn more" links are a services equivalent of the "sign up" or "learn more" that you find on many web application web sites. It sits above the fold and in a bigger font size to entice the viewer to do one of two things.
By far the biggest change was to add the grey section below the fold. Originally, this just housed our footer (navigation links and copyright), but we wanted a place to put a few testimonials as well. We added in the testimonials, but felt like something was missing. Marketing wanted to put a contact form down there, but we already had the phone number and email address in the accent bar, and nobody on the programming or design team wanted to put a form on every page in the footer. Many thought it was tacky. Our project manager came up with the idea of putting in a link to a form that would house the project sheet information that she sends out to our prospective clients. Most everyone liked that idea, but the project sheet would have made for a much larger form than most people would want to fill out. We decided just to link to the actual Word document instead - making life easier all around.
The copy was the last thing to get refreshed, and trust me, it was the hardest. We went around the horn several times in order to find a nice balance between informing prospective clients about what services we offered and actually pitching them with marketing speak; but in the end, we feel that we found that balance.
So there you have it - the genesis of our web site design. It took some inspiration and many different hands to get it this way, but it's something that we worked hard on and of which we are very, very proud.
