I have had a hell of a time lately with people copying my firms sites, basically just saving them and not changing barely anything. Most of them were built with tables which makes this fairly easy.

I know there is no magic bullet but how can I make it really hard for someone to steal the site? such as using css to call images? or css file calling other css files? things of this nature.

Why would you do that ? It really is not tough to duplicate a website. You can still copy the css / xhtml

Basically, you can't. Except: make your entire website in Flash. That's probably not feasible, but if you are bothered with copying, you could make most of it from Flash (menus, XML-based Flash for content). That you make copying it impossible.

What you should do is put a backlink on your pages or something. That way if they copy you your traffic will rise, lol.

start making crappy websites so people don't want to steal them. lol just kidding.

There really is not a whole lot you can do other than the flash idea because css, images, and javascripts can all still be accessed by the public just from your url so hiding things inside the CSS really accomplishes nothing as far as access permissions.

Read this:
http://www.grantasticdesigns.com/siteprotection3.html

Might want to keep this page bookmarked:
http://www.copyscape.com/

Regards,
FGU

Well, the flash idea isn't feasable because of SEO, but couldn't they just pull it with a flash decompiler anyway?

A while back I saved a site with a browser and it couldn't save it right because it was missing a few css files. The main css was calling five other css files and the browser did not save any of those files. So that seemed like a pretty cool way to slow people down. Also you couldn't even find the address for some of the needed files because they just used "../" a lot and I wasn't sure what directory etc.

Originally Posted by LeetPCUser

What you should do is put a backlink on your pages or something. That way if they copy you your traffic will rise, lol.

That would pretty much work! These idiots copyied several of our sites for the same industry - so they left all of the same copy, meta tags, etc. One even had us hosting the images!

One even had us hosting the images!

It's great when they do stupid things like that;

Image1.jpg

or use some ermm, dubious "adult" images

I hope you've registered a complaint with the thieve's hosting provider and ISP if you can track that down. If the hosting company is ethical, they will take measures to take the stolen sites down.

Flash decompilers are expensive and unreliable, in most circumstances, it's like locking your windows - it won't stop them, it just makes it more difficult.

Flash is good protection to a certain extent. Any person can pull the embedded SWF off your site with a site downloader program that downloads every file on the site.

prove that you created the website. Won't exactly make it harder for anyone to copy ... but alteast you can take appropriate action afterwords.

Not much like others said, but you can add like a 1px by 1px image that you can track some how to see where the image is being loaded. Then you could take appropriate legal action if it is worth it, or write a letter to the host and isp and they should correct the problem. Im not sure exactly how the image thing would work, I am not a great coder, but I have seen something like it done before.