Web Design - How To Discourage The Theft Of Design And Code

By Author: Bryan F Bell
Total Articles: 121
Comment this article

As the penetration and expanse of internet increases, the number of websites on the internet increases. This increment is usually found to be exponentially. There are different sorts of layout of web designs on the internet. Those with experience and business acumen try to be a bit different from the rest and experiment on different kinds of layout. This tendency depends on the creativity of the web designer.

Do all web designers have very good creativity? No, absolutely not. So for the designers with no creativity there is no other alternative but to copy other websites. Now if you come out with a unique web design and someone else copies it, the copier hardly has to do any effort at creativity. You as a web designer are supposed to think that you are not slogging for others to reap the fruits of your labor. You would like your design and code to be protected from being copied by others. Some of the prominent ways to discourage this tendency of copying the design and the code are as follows.

Protection of illustrations, graphics and other art work:

Some of the web design elements like graphics, illustrations ...
... and other artwork are most susceptible to be stolen especially by those designers who lack creativity.

The best way to discourage the stealing of these elements is through making them specific for your website. The best example for this is the mascot illustration. If you incorporate the name of the company and the services offered in the mascot illustration it will become very difficult for others to use the same mascot illustration. Usually people who steal the graphics, illustrations and such other art work are basically very lazy and will not like to put in effort to edit or modify the illustration mascot. So this could be one way to protect the graphics, illustrations and such other art work from getting stolen and copied.

Adding Specific Pattern and Gradients:

You can protect your illustrations and designs from being stolen by adding specific pattern and gradients to every object. If the pattern from the web design is incorporated into the illustration, it will make the illustration nearly impossible from being used by others, because this pattern cannot be easily removed from the illustration.

Using Watermarks:

Watermarks can protect your images and screen shots from being stolen. The water mark should be such that it does not cause any distraction when the image is being seen by the visitor, but at the same time it should be visible when the visitor focuses on the image/screen shot. The logo or the URL of your website could be used as a watermark.

Trademark:

When you get your logo or mascot trademarked, the rights to the creation of that logo or mascot are reserved for you. You can get the maximum support of the law if your trademarked logo or mascot are stolen and used. Once the thieves know that the logo or mascot is trademarked they will usually not dare to copy it.

Encrypt the PHP code:

This theft deterrent features conversion of the PHP code into a set of randomly chosen characters. These random characters cannot be understood unless they are decoded. For this the presence of the encoder library or encrypted on every server is a must.

One other way to deter the thieves is by making the reading of the PHP code difficult.

Copyright © 2011