September 24 2009
6 Comments written by: tom
We worked with our content management partners Terminal Four a couple of years ago to design the interface of the National Employment Rights Authority website.
The following website of a business providing employment law advice in Ireland was brought to our attention this morning:
This would seem to me to be quite clearly an act of plagiarism. When I suggested to the site owner that perhaps he had copied the design I was told that the two sites were different and that there was no similarity… and after all you couldn’t copyright page layout and images… I suddenly felt a Magritte moment coming on.
The best bit of all was that the designer/developer in question hadn’t even bothered to change the HTML code. There was code in the page referring to the fact that they were mirroring the NERA website and they left in all of the comments from the Terminal 4 content management system e.g.
<!– End T4 - Page Content Template–>
We are going to take this as a compliment I think but I am not sure that the client will be taking the same view!
September 24 2009
No Comments written by: tom
There’s a reason that Seth Godin has a gazillion people reading his blog posts every day and why he has sold millions of copies of his books. Simple. He has good ideas and knows how to communicate them.
His latest offering could (and should) torpedo the slew of “social media, buzz monitoring, twitter writing, facebook page managing” consultancies that are popping up all over the place. Brands in Public provides brands with a one stop shop of content pulled in from numerous sources so companies can see (and manage) what is being said about them onlin through one simple interface.
It seems that the site is geared primarily at the bigger brands out there - Coca Cola, Lego, Guinness etc. Why should the smaller companies of the world be precluded from this? This is surely a service that we (and other agencies) should be providing as a matter of course. We are on the case…
September 24 2009
No Comments written by: tom
The Irish Web Awards are upon us again. We were delighted to have been involved last year as a sponsor for the inaugural awards. What a refreshing experience. We tried to sponsor a category again this year but were told that if we or any of our clients wanted to enter that we would be precluded as a sponsor. This is the way it should be - awards ceremonies take note.
Given that a number of our clients were keen to submit entries (which doesn’t cost a thing…) we decided that sponsorship could wait until another year. In any case our sponsorship budget has been used up with the Digital Media Awards where we have designed and developed the site for this year’s event.
The great thing about the Irish Web Awards is the democracy of it all. There are approximately 85 judges on board - any one can apply to be a judge - and they are each given 25 sites to judge. This means that every single entry is judged a number of times by a wide variety of judges which should mean that you are getting the fairest and most objective view possible. Sponsorship, table purchase, advertising and other financially lucrative activities do not play a part in the decision making process here.
We are delighted to say that 34 of our clients have been included on shortlists in a number of categories and we can only hope now that at least one of them comes home with some glassware! Whoseview and Media Contact are both in the Best Practice category which is a testament to the efforts of the Lightbox development team - we are firmly on the fence in terms of who we want to see win!
- Whoseview.ie appears in the following categories Best New Web Application/Service, Best Social Media Campaign and Best Practice.
- Media Contact is shortlisted in the Best Practice category
- Newstalk is shortlisted in the Best Radio website category for the second year in a row.
- Totally Dublin is shortlisted in the Best Entertainment Website Category
Well done to all shortlisted websites and looking forward to a great night on October 10th.
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