The Reusability of Web Components

If you go to http://www.churchwebsitedesign.org.uk/webdesign.html, you can find an article that begins as follows:

Web Design is Product Design
By Daniel Gibbins - Project Leader and Operations Manager

Many people think of web design as being closely related to graphic design, or even just another branch of the profession. Look in your local Yellow Pages and you'll find dozens of graphic designers offering websites as one of their long list of services, along with logo design, business cards and brochures.

Websites Have to Work

Brochures, magazines ads, signs, logos and posters all differ from websites in one crucial aspect: people don't have to use them. All designers have to make sure their work is attractive, but product designers need to ensure their products are also easy to use and have features that people want.

Gibbins' article continues from there, down to the very bottom:

The Church Website Design Project © 2007

Back up at the top of the article, there is an "As Featured On Ezine @rticles" button, which directs you to http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Daniel_Gibbins.

However, when you click on this button, you are no longer directed to Gibbin's page, but to the main Ezinearticles.com page. While there, perhaps you may want to read the Terms of Service. Here's the first term:

1. You declare that you are the sole owner and author of the article and own 100% of all copyrights pertaining to it.

Well, it's too bad that Ezinearticles.com seems to be having some malfunction regarding Daniel Gibbins' bio. So let's see what other people have to say about the Daniel Gibbins article "Web Design is Product Design."

Now this is interesting:

If you’ve read my book, Web Design in easy steps, you’ll know I devote some space to the fact that Web Design is very like product design … well the N95 is a superb example of product design.

But this isn't signed by Gibbins; it's signed by some guy named "Rich." Oh well, I guess Gibbins must use a pen name or something like that.

Let's see what else I can find out about Gibbins' article. Ah, now this is interesting:

5. The rules of good design

Pencil & paper
How big is a web page?
Getting to grips with the grid
The art of typography
Fonts on the Web
Websites aren't printed on paper
Using color
Lines & shapes
Gradients & texture
Size & contrast
Position is everything
Guiding people's eyes
Attention to detail
Less is more
Web design is product design
The call to action
Ugly websites make money
Case study: Convention & style

Hmm...but this page doesn't name Gibbins either. It refers to some guy named Richard Quick.

So how do I find out about the DANIEL GIBBINS article "Web Design is Product Design"? Ah, here's a mention of Gibbins and the article, again written by this "Rich" guy:

I was doing a vanity search recently, and discovered an article which looked similar to something I’d written. Very similar. Identical in fact.

The original article was written by me and appears on pages 74 and 75 of my book, with the title “Web Design is Product Design”.

The plagiarized article appears on a website called “The Church Web Design Project”.

It is stolen - word for word - from my book....

I was particularly intrigued to find a link to Ezine Articles, an article marketing website, on the page. I followed the link and found that the same person who had stolen my article to use on his own, supposedly Christian, website had also posted various other articles - many of them by me on Ezine Articles.

The person’s name is Daniel Gibbins. He was claiming to be the writer and an “expert” on web design....

Let me make myself crystal clear on this. Daniel Gibbins is not the copyright holder and does not have permission to use these articles. The articles he’s used are stolen.

Not only that, he’s claiming to be the author and attempting to win clients as a web designer off the back of this “expertise”. As far as I’m concerned, that’s defrauding me personally. I’m the author and it took me a lot of time and hard to work gain any level of expertise I may have. If people are going to be using any web designer off the back of those articles, it should not be him.

Also, he is also putting other people on the wrong side of the law, as they will unknowingly use these articles, without realizing that they’re actually breaking copyright.

It’s one thing to copy work out of a published book and use it on your own site. That’s wrong. But to publish it on a website where other people are MEANT to download and use the articles and to set yourself up as an “expert” on web design is just downright dishonest.

For the record, I heard about this whole thing from a William Tildesley post.

Tildesley links to a page that alleges some other thefts by Gibbins, including "Becoming a Search Result on Google" and "Does Google Know You're There? PageRank and More," which apparently originated in a book entitled Google: The Missing Manual by Sarah Milstein, Jude Biersdorfer, and Matthew MacDonald.

Well, guess what? Richard Quick is trying to make Daniel Gibbins a highly ranked search term:

would like to ask readers of this blog to do me a tiny favour. I’d like them to link to this article using the link text Daniel Gibbins. Eg.

Daniel Gibbins

I want anybody who searches for “Daniel Gibbins” in Google to find this page first.
Then, I hope, they won’t use him.

Isn't technology wonderful?

But I have one question: who actually took the photograph of Fakenham Church?

P.S. Also check this out.

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