Posted on October 30, 2006 in Web-Design, with 0 comments.

So the other day I’m over at StatCounter checking the daily numbers, when I notice something very odd. One of the stat tools on StatCounter is a thing called: Exit Page Stats . It basically gives you a ranking of pages people left the site on. It’s funny, because it’s basically useless to me, and I don’t normally check that stat. You see StatCounter gives you a little snippet of javascript to insert into all your pages so it can track things like content popularity, entry pages, and exit pages. But I’ve only got the code inserted into my front page, so that’s the only page it tracks. And so it came as quite a surprise when one of the exit pages listed was this: “http://www.gtitags.com”:http://www.gtitags.com .

I admit, at first I was truly perplexed. I had no idea whatsoever why this random domain was showing up in my stats. A couple of possibilities came to mind. Could it be one of my Textpattern plug-ins misbehaving? Or maybe StatCounter itself got it’s database a bit jumbled. The answer was simple. This is what I found:

Does that background color look familiar? How about the navigation bar, and the position of the logo? It seems someone over at GtiTags decided to copy, not just my design, but my entire code. And here’s the kicker, the reason they were showing up in my stats is because they were too lazy (or apathetic) to remove the StatCounter javascript snippet, thus giving me hits from their website. As far as I can tell they lifted all the code as is, which is evident when you check their source.

It’s weird, while I feel a little hurt, and angry that someone would take my hard work and copy it line for line , it is a little flattering. That being said, I’m not sure what to do about it. What would you do? A few people have suggested writing an angry email. I was actually thinking about just emailing them a link to this article, and waiting to see what happens. Either way, their email addresses are at the end of the article if any of you want to textually reprimand them. I’m gonna wait a few more days and wait to see what you guys think.

The moral of the story: when stealing pretty much all of someones HTML and CSS be careful to remove the referring stat counter before uploading to a live domain.

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