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How Not to Steal a Site Design
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Martin Burns
User since: April 26, 1999
Last login: October 04, 2009
Articles written: 128
Our good friends at Proxima Consulting seem to have problems deciding what to put on their site. Poor lambs.
They also seem to have had problems with coming up with an effective user experience.
So, in the best tradition of dumb people everywhere, they stole it. All. Words, images, layout, sitemap down to a URL level. Everything.
Which would have been fine (in a 'not' sense) except that they stole it from one of the better UK CED and SI agencies, Oyster
...who found it when one of their staff was doing some research last weekend. The only changes Proxima had made seems to have been a crude search and replace on the Oyster name, even claiming that Proxima had merged with companies who had in fact merged with Oyster.
Since being called on it, Proxima have pulled the entire site beyond the Flash intro. So skipping the intro means you also skip the entire site. Nice.
Fortunately, Google has a cached copy. Here are a couple of samples:
- Proxima's jobs page and Oyster's job page.
- Oyster's history (note the KBW merger info) and approach -v- Proxima's approach (who say that they merged with KBW).
Oyster took a copy of the offending site and contacted Proxima, which may explain the Proxima site disappearance. I hear that Oyster aren't going to sue... at the moment
Can you imagine being the person responsible, and the meeting held at Proxima to consider his or her future... Are they selling tickets?
