Forum Moderators: open
I’ve been so bogged down for the last couple of months -- between problems with an aging family member, trying to learn PHP, learn about the affiliate game, building some intense databases for my full-time job, plus planning an exquisite but hellishly complex (or so it seems at my level) dream site -- that I’ve ended up with a severe case of inertia.
This weekend though I managed to just put that all aside and build. Just sat down with a pencil and paper and sketched a couple of pages, moved to the computer and started coding. It was one of those times when it clicked.... this lovely little site just unfolded under my fingertips. The design came so fast and easy that I haven’t even finalised a domain name for it - couldn’t stop coding long enough to register a name.
It’s basically a very simple directory-style site. Superfast, clean code, obscenely SE friendly and user friendly. It’s nothing earth shatteringly new or flash... in fact it’s exactly the opposite - intentionally. It’s a site that’s so simple you think “I’ve been here before”, just because it combines some of the simplest and most familiar elements of web page design.
Tonight I polished off the site templates, and thought I’d go for a wee reward-surf before registering a name and starting work on the logo. So off I cruise.. a game of spaced penguin here, WebmasterWorld active list there, chat site in between..... check a few recip link pages, looking at possible exchanges.....
Hello! There’s my site. Or its doppelganger. Or maybe my site is this site’s doppelganger. Whatever. Either way, they could be twins. Same layout to within 10 or 20 px here or there. Same colors - or near enough I had to check the code to tell them apart (but we’re talking basic white, greys, standard link blue and a bit of red to set it off). Same fonts - again, not when I checked in the code, but on the face of it, my Verdana/Arial looks a helluva lot like their Trebuchet.
What’s worse... it’s the same TYPE of directory as mine. Same site purpose.
If you compare the code on each site, it’s totally different.
Them: no CSS, standard table layout. Bad code, a lot of redundant tags (enough that I’d suggest they have stripped this page down from something else, or have used a bad WYSIWYG tool), ridiculous number of tables nested several levels deep.
Mine: CSS for font styling, simple two table layout. Menu on SSI to make growing the site easier.
My pages are less than half the code size of theirs. If you look at the code, these are completely different sites. But oooh boy... put em up in browser windows side by side.. there’s hardly a hair between them.
I know I haven’t seen this site before and just subconsciously regurgitated it - partly because I bookmark EVERYTHING, and partly because it appears to only be a few months old...
I know I don’t want to change anything in my design. I’ve looked and looked... everything is ‘just right’ as it is...
I know if you put a thousand monkeys in a room with a thousand typewriters for a thousand years.. or however that goes... one of them will eventually bang out the complete works of William Shakespeare...
What I don’t know, is what to do now. I am utterly deflated.
If the sites were totally different topics - say ‘banana cultivation’ and ‘nuclear physics’, I’d not be nearly so fussed. But these are both shopping directories, and given that they’re both aimed at affiliate programme sites, the chances are I will run across this other site somewhere along the line.
What would you do?
Has this ever happened to you?
What level of ‘original’ design do you consider acceptable?
Weird though, very weird. Have you seen the same sort of design elswhere that you both could have drawn from?
Cheers
While originality is obviously important, I think that for some kinds of websites there are only so many ways of doing things. For example, look around at most forums, they all look very much the same. And if you put together a forum with a radically different layout no one would know how to use it.
Directories also seem to fall into this category. There are only so many ways you can present the information in a useful, meaningful way for the end user. I've seen a number in the niche I'm interested in which are laid out in a very similar manner, down to the categories used for their listings. Anything else just wouldn't make sense. So I wouldn't worry so much about the structure, particularly as it sounds like you've got the coding side well sorted when they haven't so much.
I guess that's when branding comes in. You still need to do something that makes your directory stand out as different. Many sites do this using colours and logos, something to give their site a theme. I don't think you need to go over the top, webmasterworld stands out from a lot of forums because it doesn't have fancy stuff all over the place but is clean and functional.
The directories I've been looking at have mostly the same colours too (those functional greys), but each one has something which makes it different. And not just in layout, one of them has a wider scope, unique categories the others don't offer, more on-topic entries and is not only useful to me as an end user but has a great system where I can update the details of sites I have listed. It's those things in the end which take me back there rather than the way it looks.
I hope you get it figured out anyway.
I've wracked my brain and bookmarks to see if I may have drawn the design from elsewhere, but nope. That said, it incorporates a lot of elements that are common across a heap of sites.
Simple left hand table navigation about 150 px wide. Standard link blue for links. Pale grey background for the menu, white background for the rest of the page.
Directory of sites running down body of the page. Serif font for headings (site names). Site "byline" to right of site name in sans-serif. Sans-serif for site descriptions - actually that is different: they've used serif.
On a level of 'coincidence', the designs are so simple it's more like a case of "oh look... you drew your daisy with five petals in yellow crayon and so did I" than "holy cow... you mean Michelangelo's Cistene Chapel looks just like my bedroom ceiling?"
Maybe I'll just have to jazz up my logo colours a bit and spread a little colour around to differentiate them.
I've seen a number in the niche I'm interested in which are laid out in a very similar manner, down to the categories used for their listings. Anything else just wouldn't make sense.
That's one of the first things that blew me away. Their structure/categories was identical almost down to wording (apart from two categories they have that I didn't and vice versa). But you are dead right - anything else would not make sense.
I've just noticed an area where they have split into sub-cats - which I intend to do too, but differently from how they have done. One or two other user-friendliness tricks I can throw in too.
Feeling a bit better now... though a medicinal gin might still be in order. :)
This is a good area to emphasise. Make sure to tell everyone why yours is better. And actually make it better of course, although it sounds like you have this pretty well covered. Useability and usefulness is what will bring people back. I would probably change the colours and stuff a little too.
This is like in the Diskworld novels, little particles of inspiration sleeting through the univerise hitting the occasional person. It sounds like someone got the same particle you did, it's just you have a better idea of how to code it ;)
Simple left hand table navigation about 150 px wide. Standard link blue for links. Pale grey background for the menu, white background for the rest of the page.
Deejay, you and your doppleganger are both ripping off my personal vanity site and I insist that you cease and desist immediately ;) Unless you don't feel like it, of course, in which case carry on.
Man I hate being copied ;)
We bought a wacky domain name and built a really fun site around it. We sunk more time and effort into it than we should have.
Two weeks later one of our software developers called me into his office and said, "Hey, is this our site?" I looked on his screen and it was a competitor - similar wacky-type domain name, almost exact same design.
Turns out their site was up before our site was, but I never saw it before I designed ours.
Ugh.
I think for me it was the fact that the wacky-type domain name we bought just lends itself to the design we did ... and it led the other guys to the same conclusion.
Best thing to do, IMO, is not worry too much about it. Like Shelleycat said, there are only so many ways of doing things. You didn't copy the other site, so don't sweat about it too much.
*lol* thanks guys.. that was just what I needed to hear.
yeesh! Hawkgirl, that woulda really sucked. I feel for ya... but I'm sooo glad I'm not the only one :)
