copyright on gunlaug.com

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side notes.

copyright?
COPYRIGHT

Copyright laws and regula­tions found around the world, recognize and protect original work, regard­less of whether the © sign is attached to it or not. In practice the pro­tec­tion relies on people's respect for original creators' or owners' right to control and limit reuse and spread of their own work and property.

kind of flattering

Plagiarism and theft is growing with the expansion of the web and similar channels. More and more people show less and less respect for other people's work and property. A sad fact, but also kind of flattering for those who get their work copied or imitated. Someone must really like it a lot in order to take the chance of being caught and shamed.

No hard laws against plagiarism, but if the person/group behind the original work have a case and really want to do something about it, they won't have to look far for moral support.

a few copies around

For obvious reasons I won't point/link to the few copies of my earlier site-layouts I have found while surfing. It doesn't bother me the slightest that they are up, I was just a bit surprised to find that someone really thought they were worth copying.

In my case I have a suspicion that someone copied those layouts to study how they worked. If that's the case it's kind of OK with me, as learning by dissecting other people's web-work may speed up the learning-process.

Not a good idea to place complete copies of other people's layouts/​designs in the open on the web for any reason though, as not everyone like to find non-approved copies of their own work while surfing/​searching.

Better keep such stuff out of view on a local hard-disk or in a pass­word-protected folder on line, and study how they work there.

study web-work

The W3C actually promotes learning web design by down­loading and studying other people's work, and I do of course have no problem with such a policy. For the average wannabe web designer / coder there aren't all that many good alter­na­tives to learn in depth how it is done.

Although the number of sites that offer web-templates, complete solu­tions, and all kinds of related stuff for free, is quite high, much of what is being offered isn't exactly ground-breaking stuff. Most of that stuff is plenty good enough for those who only want to copy and paste for a private site, but not if one wants to build and present a site as ones own creation.

There are great exceptions if one knows what to look for and where to look, but for the average wannabe web designer / coder, finding and sorting out the really good stuff in a sea of “just web-stuff” can't be all that easy. Once upon a time I was in that very same position myself, which is why I started to “roll my own” designs and solutions.

As with all else in life: once you know how it all works, building up web sites from scratch with all wanted design details and func­tion­ality in place, is fairly easy. All one need is plenty of time and patience, to code and test.

I recommend sifting through the markup and CSS docu­men­tation on the W3C site first, where the web stan­dards are explained in (quite) some details. Looking around for well-working design-examples should rather be put off until you have acquired some basic know­ledge, so you can at least sort the fairly good examples from the really bad ones.

also in print…