Every now and then, us Web designers will have to face the fact that our design has been illegally copied. And the typical designer will want to resolve the situation as quickly as possible. This guide explains not only what steps you can take to prevent the theft of your designs, but outlines what actions you should take against anyone who copies your work.

Preventative Measures

Prevention really is better than cure. The best thing to do is to try to prevent the illegal reproduction of your design before it even happens. Some suggest that you should disable the users’ right click capability, place transparent images over your real images, “scramble” your source code, and more. However, none of these methods truly protect your content from being copied — and all do more to alienate your regular visitors than they do to protect your design. The absolute bottom line with copyright is: if you don’t work to be stolen, don’t put it on the Web. For some, it’s not even worth the risk. But for others, this approach is a bit radical, and the majority will try to think of some better ways to protect what’s theirs.

The most important thing you should always do is to label your work with the appropriate copyright disclaimers, trademarks, etc. It’s a great idea to have a “legal notices” page on your Website, to inform everyone in complete detail that copying someone’s work is a violation of international copyright laws, and that they will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law if they use your work without your express consent. Publishing this warning helps deter would-be design thieves, and helps reinforce to all users that you know your rights.

A good user community is not only essential to maintaining a good traffic flow; if your site is copied, and you have a good community of visitors, you can be pretty sure that someone will notice it and let you know. If you have a message board, create a thread in your forums to let your users know that any information they can provide about illegal rips will be greatly appreciated (or even consider providing some rewards for good leads) as an additional measure.

Doing a little work like this in advance won’t eliminate every threat of illegal copying, but will cut down on the number of cases you have to chase.

There are many ways to add content to your website:

Write Yourself -

Writing yourself is a less expensive way of generating the content. But for this you require a good knowledge of your subject to be able to write excellently on it. If you have the skills and time to generate content then this is really the best way to take. You have to concentrate on your site’s purpose and find a way to balance the information in categories that help to communicate your goals.

Appoint someone else to write -

If you do not feel confident enough of writing good content yourself, it’s better to appoint a good writer to do it for you. But before selecting a suitable copywriter, but he should possess Search Engine Marketing (SEM) or Search Engine Optimization (SEO) copywriting experience. As you have a website which is selling your business and your main goal is to bring traffic to your website. So a person with an experience of SEM/SEO can only do wonders for your business.

It is well known that Google uses links as an important factor in determining PR (Page Rank). Frequently adding links will have a much better effect than adding links in bundles.

The search engine observes the invention date of links, the life span of the link and the rate at which a new web site obtains links. This approach shows that Google is discounting fast link exchange strategies such as buying many links for your site. Instead, Google appears to consider a natural linking evolution as an indication that a site is authorized.

The specifics of a good linking strategy are a little difficult to nail down. Factors that might be considered include:

1 The anchor text of the link.

2 The invention date of the link.

3 The growth rate of links to your site.

4 The rate at which links to a page appear and disappear.

5 The age of links with older links gets more value.

6 Many links to a new site will be looked at as spam, unless some of the links are from highly valued sites.

7 Link growths that are constant are optimal.

8 Unforeseen bunches of new links will be degraded as spam.

To keep all of the machines on the Internet straight, each machine is assigned a unique address called an IP address. IP stands for Internet protocol, and these addresses are 32-bit numbers normally expressed as four “octets” in a “dotted decimal number.” A typical IP address looks like this: 216.183.103.150

The four numbers in an IP address are called octets because they can have values between 0 and 256 (28 possibilities per octet).

Every machine on the Internet has its own IP address. A server has a static IP address that does not change very often. A home machine that is dialing up through a modem often has an IP address that is assigned by the ISP when you dial in. That IP address is unique for your session and may be different the next time you dial in. In this way, an ISP only needs one IP address for each modem it supports, rather than for every customer.

If you are working on a Windows machine, you can view your current IP address with the command WINIPCFG.EXE (IPCONFIG.EXE for Windows 2000/XP). On a UNIX machine, type nslookup along with a machine name (such as “nslookup www.howstuffworks.com”) to display the IP address of the machine (use the command hostname to learn the name of your machine).

As far as the Internet’s machines are concerned, an IP address is all that you need to talk to a server. For example, you can type in your browser the URL http://216.183.103.150 and you will arrive at the machine that contains the Web server for HowStuffWorks. Domain names are strictly a human convenience.

The Basics

When you use the Web or send an e-mail message, you use a domain name to do it. For example, the URL “http://www.howstuffworks.com” contains the domain name howstuffworks.com. So does the e-mail address “iknow@howstuffworks.com.”

Human-readable names like “howstuffworks.com” are easy for people to remember, but they don’t do machines any good. All of the machines use names called IP addresses to refer to one another. For example, the machine that humans refer to as “www.howstuffworks.com” has the IP address 216.183.103.150. Every time you use a domain name, you use the Internet’s domain name servers (DNS) to translate the human-readable domain name into the machine-readable IP address. During a day of browsing and e-mailing, you might access the domain name servers hundreds of times!

Domain name servers translate domain names to IP addresses. That sounds like a simple task, and it would be — except for five things:

* There are billions of IP addresses currently in use, and most machines have a
human-readable name as well.
* There are many billions of DNS requests made every day. A single person can easily make a hundred or more DNS requests a day, and there are hundreds of millions of people and machines using the Internet daily.
* Domain names and IP addresses change daily.
* New domain names get created daily.
* Millions of people do the work to change and add domain names and IP addresses every day.

The DNS system is a database, and no other database on the planet gets this many requests. No other database on the planet has millions of people changing it every day, either. That is what makes the DNS system so unique!

When you’re new to blogging, a free blogging web site is a good way to get started. Famous blogging web sites like Blogger and Eponym permit users to set up and host a blog for no cost at all. The reality that one of these sites can supply you with all of the tools that you require to get your blog up and running for free encourages people to start a blog. As it’s free, you don’t have something to lose. Many people that have never had any other type of web presence before find themselves drawn to blogging, partially because it is so easy to find a way to blog for free.

Compared to starting your own blog from start, signing up with a free blogging web site will get you indexed in search engines much easier. For example, Google, that runs the free blog hosting site Blogspot, crawls its pages very frequently to look for updates. As a result, if you have a Blogspot blog, you are almost guaranteed to be indexed on Google’s blog search engine. This way you can spend less time on promoting your blog, and you can gain a following with a less of marketing effort.

If your blog attracts many readers, you may want to consider about moving your site. Many people consider that a blog that is hosted by a free blogging web site has a kind of amateur flavor, not suitable for a high-profile blog. Your own domain name can help you make your blog feel professional, and searching a web host is not difficult or expensive. Once your blog starts to attract a large readership, you will probably be able to sell sufficient advertising space to be able to afford to buy your own domain and pay for a hosting package, and still have money left over. However, until you have a sizeable readership, there’s really no requirement to invest in these luxuries.

When you want to build a following before you invest any money on your blog, using a free blogging website is a good idea. Further, when you feel ready to take the next step and pay for your personal domain, your readers will trail you to your new home.