Website Theft – Pitfalls and Opportunities

A case of website and web copyright theft MintTwist, a London web development agency, and N.I.D-lab both create websites. N.I.D-lab stole MintTwist’s website with a cut-and-paste job. The Original MintTwist Website

Stolen MintTwist Website with MintTwist clients still listed

This provides MintTwist with an opportunity to demonstrate an important selling point Indulge us… Ok, Clients of MintTwist, the multi-national web design and web marketing company are a smart bunch. They know that for a business website to be successful at winning more new sales leads it must get the right messages across to the right audience groups in a fast and effective manner. In a nutshell this is the secret of website success and the true value of a web design service. It follows then, that one design does not fit all… For example, target customers of MintTwist are medium sized businesses that target customers in the UK, Europe, USA and across the Middle East. MintTwist returns value to its clients by helping them to increase their revenue by significantly growing the number of sales leads they achieve from their web strategy through improved web design and web marketing services. The design that MintTwist created for their website gets this message across. Conversely, N.I.D-lab, is a cheap web design company that offers cheap website services to anyone. The design that they have chosen for their website is a cut-and-paste copy of the MintTwist website. This was an error of judgement for several reasons …. Pitfalls for the offender and their clients As well as risking a lawsuit for themselves and any of their clients, who will be liable if they have performed the same ‘service’ for them, they have also failed at the first fundamental step of web design. The MintTwist website design is aimed at well-informed professionals with a vision of how to extract a significant return from their website purchase. These are not the kind of customers who will buy from N.I.D-lab and therefore should not be N.I.D-labs targets. The next time N.I.D-lab decide to ‘re-design’ their website, to make it more effective they would be well advised to focus and optimise for their own (somewhat unique) selling point and target customer group – “cheap copies for people who like getting sued”. What to do if your website is stolen? If you are a website owner who have had your website stolen you should consider legal action. Google can also help to prevent damage by black-listing offenders using the power of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The Google page dealing with offenders of website theft will provide more information on this. More Opportunities Talk to us for some great web designing services and digital marketing ideas at [email protected] or @MintTwist.