Daily Brad, the blog

When I worked for Omniture as their Creative Director, I would often check the web analytics that we ran on our corporate website to see where people were coming from (referrers). Occasionally I would find several page views that were sent through from what I like to call “Website Pirates”: individuals who would pillage and plunder our site design and use it as their own. They’d be working with the html as templates while building their own site, and forget to take the tracking code off, and send through hits that I could follow. On one “design” we had to get Legal involved since they didn’t even bother to replace the imagery we owned with their own after it went live.

While reading Joshua Steimle’s blog about website piracy on MWi’s website, I got thinking to myself - I sure wish I had screen shots of all those websites that copied my design for the original Omniture website.

To make a long story short (my blog posts always run long), I was looking at a list of public companies in Utah a couple days ago. I really only knew of a couple and was curious just how many there were. One intrigued me, so I accessed their website. The Park City Group was founded by Randy Fields, the co-founder and former chairman of Mrs. Fields Cookies. Their customers include such well-known names as The Home Depot, Foot Locker, Inc., The Limited, Albertson’s, Schnuck Markets, Pacific Sunwear of California, Wawa, Busch Entertainment and Tesco Lotus. And guess what? Their website design is pirated.

Here’s the design I did for Omniture (it was live 2002-2005):

Click to View Larger Version in a New Window

Here’s the current website for Park City Group:

Click to View Larger Version in a New Window

The layout is the same, all the links are in the same order (the Login and Home tabs are stolen, only altered by a gradient), each area features the same content, and even the second levels use the same dot pattern, grid, and header style of the Omniture site I designed.

The Client is the Loser
Most of the time when web piracy occurred with one of my designs, the client that bought the design was completely unaware of the fact that the website they purchased was stolen from another site. One time I even had a former associate of mine steal the Omniture design, and when discovered had the gall to say that I had given him permission to do so. “I did no such thing” I told Legal. They took care of it from there.

Do I care? Not really. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, isn’t it? Plus, Omniture isn’t using the design anymore, so why should it matter? I just hope that the Park City Group didn’t pay some web development firm a pretty penny for a pirated design… that’s where the shame lies.

Has this happened to you? I’d love to hear about it. (Comment link below)

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 5th, 2006 at 11:16 pm and is filed under Brad McCall designer, Freelance Do and Donts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.