Site rips have been around forever. Just like everything else, the net is not always the nicest of places. If you have a design that is really well liked, there will always be someone out there who will go the distance to copy the design down to every last detail. So, what can you do about this?

Discovering Site Rips

It happens daily, especially to the very best of designers. One of the most recent cases includes Matt Brett’s feedicons.com. Matt discovered the rip yesterday, which was his exact design with graphics and text changed – but fonts and everything else remaining the same.

When I woke up today, I discovered Devlounge version one had also been ripped. The design remained exactly the same, and the subdomain was even “dl-clone”.

Depending on how well known your site is, many times it will not take long for others or yourself to discover a rip. In my case, as it has been with others as well, the ripper left a stats tracking code remaining in the header. In other cases, people will leave links back to your own site.

What to do after discovering a rip

Initially, after realizing someone is attempting to rip off your site, your blood begins to boil. Who can blame you, when you are witnessing your hard work being spoiled by other unrespectful people.

You have a couple of early options:

• Contact the host – Use a whois service to find out the dns of the ripper’s url, especially if the site is already live. Let the host know this person has ripped off your site, and if you can not work it out with the person themselves, you’d like to see the site shut down.
• Talk directly to the person – If you can get their contact information, try to settle things directly with them. Of course, this will almost never be a friendly conversation, but as a ripper, you weren’t intending to be friendly anyway.
• Get designer information – Sometimes, people will be paying other “designers” to do work for them, and the designers are the ones selling the rips. Don’t blame the site owner for this if they trully didn’t know. In some cases though, site owners will outsource and find someone willing to rip off your site for them, in which cases, both designer and client own their share of the blame.

If talks do not go well, your best bet is to leave a large stain on the person’s reputation. Site such as Ripperhunting, which allow you to submit the original and ripped sites.

Be sure to watch out for young designers as well. When I was first starting on the web, I did rip designs and their code, opened them open and dreamweaver and experimented with the code, but most times you can tell by the rip itself or by getting in touch with the person what their true intents really are.

Back when Devlounge first launched in April 2006, one of our very first articles highlighted how we put together Devlounge, titled The Design Process. Roughly four months later, Devlounge is back and sporting a brand new, updated design, and what better way to kick off the new look with an article highlighting everything it takes to redesign your site.

Plan, Plan, Plan

Way back in April when DL was just starting, I was already planning what I would want to see come the next version of Devlounge. Prash continued to tell me to slow down, and not think so far ahead, but I couldn’t help it. I wanted to see Devlounge succeed, so much so that barely a week and a half into the launch I had ideas spinning for DL2.

The thing is, there is no such thing as thinking too far ahead. It’s important to plan for the future, especially on the Internet, because many time in order to stay afloat you need to be on top on the days advancements.

Even in April, I planned to launch DL2 in the summer, hoping for a late July or Early August relaunch. But it would all depend on another event, that was looming in the near future.

Public opinion does its part

It all would come down to the results of the 9Rules Round 4 Submission. I made plans with myself to get going on DL2 if I was accepted into 9Rules. If I wasn’t, I would hold off DL2 until the end of the year.

Devlounge was accepted into 9Rules, so I got right into it, putting together my first mocks and ideas in mid May. One thing that was very enlightening was the public’s view on Devlounge. So many people left wonderful feedback on the Devlounge design, that it pushed me to want to make things better, while at the same time leaving the layout somewhat intact, because it has been received so well.

For those of you subscribed to the Devlounge Main Feed who may have not have made your daily visit to Devlounge, you’ll probably notice something different upon arrival.

Devlounge isn’t there – Ok, not really.

Devlounge has been replaced with a new splash screen, that’s going to be holding it’s own until the (re)launch of Devlounge, aka DL2 on Saturday, July 15th. One place worth checking out during the wait is the new Devlounge Comminity Forum, a place for you to discuss just about anything. It’s powered by Vanilla 1, because we love supporting Open Source Software.

Get ready everyone, DL2 is on it’s way.

While Devlounge remains accessible by using direct links to our content, we advise you to hold off for a few days, as we will begin to move things over, and the design could be thrown off for short periods of time.

We are getting very close to the launch of Devlounge 2. As it sits now, mostly everything is done, we have some minor things to add & tweak, but we’re probably sitting at 80% right now. Once again, Dave will be contributing another amazing header (we wanted to change things up a bit ). I can ensure you, once Devlounge relaunches, this lack of content will be gone for good.

I managed to get an account on Crazyegg during its beta phase and since then I have been playing around with it. When I first saw Crazyegg I thought it was just another application for analysing your visitors or a basic version of Mint.

Playing around with Crazyegg made me realise that it’s a very powerful tool to analyse where visitors click on your website, on what pages they click on and where or which page do they most click on.

The signup process is very easy, it simply asks you for your email address and password, simple and fast! Once you’ve signed up and logged in you will see the dashboard:

Crazyegg works with sessions. A session lasts for 14 days or permits a maximum number of 100,000 clicks. Once 14 days have passed or your users have clicked more than 100,000 times on your website your session is terminated and then you can view its results (A session’s details can also be reviewed when the session is active).

Once you create a session you are given a small piece of Javascript which you have to insert at the bottom of your website. The installation and tracking process is really easy; Crazyegg’s javascript does all the work for you!

When viewing the results there are three different forms of seeing them, they are:

1. Overlay
2. List
3. Heatmap

The ‘Overlay’ is one of Crazyegg’s unique features, each link on your website has a little + sign where Crazyegg shows the amount of times this button has been clicked as a percentage, no other stats application does this.

The list feature is some what similar to other statistic applications and is just a basic form of displaying numbers.

Finally, this is where Crazyegg rocks in my opinion, this idea is so unique, the heatmap! There’s no need for me to explain this, take a look at the screenshot below!

Although Crazyegg is still in beta it still does lack a couple of features. Firstly, past sessions should be able to be deleted and renamed. Furthermore, the user should be allowed to define how long a session on his/her website will last for.

To conclude, Crazyegg is a new wonderful free tool that lets you analyse where visitors on your website click, it’s a powerful tool and it can be used to improve the navigation within you website. It’s obvious that the developers have put in a lot of time into this project, I’m sure it will succeed.

What’s up everyone. Hopefully you’re all enjoying the holiday weekend for those of you in the U.S. Once again, I know content’s been lacking lately, but it’s all for a good reason.

As I write this, Prash is nearing completion of the coding of DL2, which I can begin coding in WordPress on another server.

I’m looking for about 10 people (can’t be staff) who will want the chance to see DL2 before anyone else. They’ll be plenty of new things that need testing in various browsers, screen resolutions, etc. We want to make sure everything’s in check before DL2 goes live.

If you’re interested, please use the contact form on the contact page (wow, that’s original) to drop me a line. Once I reach the limit, I’ll let you know in this post. You must be willing to provide feedback, comments, and report design bugs and things you encounter. If you plan on doing this just so you can steal our code, sorry .

Stay tuned, July will be a big month, we just have to get through some of the slowness around here right now.

The DL Team (AJ & Prash)