In a way, a good ecommerce website is a work of art. Form and function working together. An intersection of intuitive navigation, usable information architecture, an appealing look-and-feel, and attention to detail. An experienced web design company is more likely to have the skills necessary to deliver on that promise. When sites are developed by companies with little experience creating e-commerce sites, it usually shows.

What makes for good ecommerce site design? That's hard to answer, because it's so subjective. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. You could survey "the man on the street" and see what he says about your site. We've all seen plenty of sites where the design looks shoddy, amateurish, cluttered, hokey, or otherwise lacking. Here's a random example that I just happened across while searching Google; the site definitely needs some attention.

Sometimes it could be that the design just needs some finessing rather than a total gutting. It's amazing what a bit of detailing work can do. Consider this before and after that I discussed in a recent Practical Ecommerce article. It still looks like the same company, but it's an attractive facelift (IMHO) with SEO and conversion optimization built-in.

They say that "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery." But not if you're a site owner! I've seen designs copied, content copied, even entire sites copied. It's so easy for someone to "view source" and take whatever they like, without regard to copyright.

You can locate copyright infringers pretty easily with Copyscape if they've lifted some of your page copy. It's much more difficult if they've limited their sticky fingers to just your design.

So far I've discovered by tip-off or by chance that our Netconcepts.com site design has been "pinched" at least 3 times. One of them was a fairly big company. More than a year and they finally stopped using our design, but the evidence of their misbehavior is permanently archived in the Wayback Machine (hint: pick a date in 2004 and compare with my company's site). In fact, the Wayback Machine is quite useful in that it can serve as indisputable proof of who is the source and who is the copy: whichever site shows the design in use before the other is the source.

The way I see it, you have five options for dealing with an infringer:

• Do nothing,
• file a DMCA infringement notification with Google, to get them yanked out of Google,
• contact the infringing company's CEO,
• "out" them on your blog :-)
• have your lawyer send them a nastygram.

I have to admit that we've often done nothing, just because we're so busy. Eventually they'll redesign (maybe pinching another design from somewhere else?). Of course that's not a great option if you're serious about protecting your IP (intellectual property) rights.

With our most recent infringer, we've taken a more active role. We spoke to their CEO. He asked for 2 months to redesign, which we've granted them.

So, what would you do? What's the most legally correct response? The most pragmatic response?