Hey all,
I've recently noticed (to my dismay) that my high school's website has ripped (actually, attempted to rip) its design from another high school's website (and not only have they stolen the design, they've stolen it badly, it looks clunky).

Here's my high school's website: http://www.ptc.dcs.edu/schools/hs/dhs/dhspage.html
And the high school they ripped off: http://www.scsk12.org/SCS/high/Germantown/index.htm

How did I know they ripped off Germantown High School's website? Well, being the curious web developer that I am, I had a glance at my school website's source code, as I was wondering how the "developer" created the site (hand-coded, MS Frontpage, etc), and how bad their code practices were (and they are BAD! <p>'s shouldn't be used for vertical spacing!!). So, when I looked at the source, this line caught my eye:

<!-- saved from url=(0051)http://www.scsk12.org/SCS/high/Germantown/index.htm -->

What have we here? A URL pointing to the site whose design was stolen, of course!
This comment is called a "Mark of the Web", and it's a feature of Internet Explorer. In short, it allows the appropriate security levels to be used when a webpage is saved (see: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/libr...8VS.85%29.aspx). So the "developer" of our new school website went to the Germantown High School website, saved that webpage, and edited it using Microsoft Office.

There's so many other things wrong with this. Horrible coding practices, the page breaks in anything other than IE, images for links, tables for layout, spaces for positioning, <p>'s for moving content down, malformed and nonfunctioning <meta>'s, a mixture of CSS and inline old-fashioned styling, references to local files via file:///, and even copying the (proprietary and costly) code that Germantown High School's website used for their drop-down menus (our site doesn't even use drop-down menus...).

This makes me ashamed to call myself a student of this school. They should've come to me if they wanted a redesign.

Take this as a lesson. Make up your own site. It just makes you look bad if you copy another (especially if you copy it badly!)

So, question. How illiegal is this? They're not using the proprietary drop-down code (I don't believe they can access it), but they still copy many design elements.

Sincerely,
~Trey

That depends on how possessive the copied high school is of their code. A straight rip-off is just unethical, even though it's almost impossible to copyright code, the site itself is really copyrighted by the school. Someone decided to take the 'low road' to get your HS's site done.

I would mention what you found to the school, or perhaps the school board

My guess is the person who designed/developed your school's site looked to the other site for inspiration and probably kept a little too much of the original.

What you might want to do is create your own design and maybe a one page site and show someone at your school who can make a decision about going with your new design.

You cant really say he stole someones website, stealing someones website means you copy their site and then only change the images and text the only thing that looks the same to me is the left and right sides.

Different enough that I don't see a huge issue....other than the fact that they're both fairly craptacular.

Maybe have a word with a decision maker at your school and convince him/her to raise their standards regarding any future theft.