The continuing saga of the site system theft…

I’m not being vindictive or vengeful. I’m just informing the guy of real problems that he walked into without really thinking about it ahead of time.

Ok, so if someone steals a replicated site system, they are probably biting off more than they can chew. Their actions may come back to bite them in ways they never anticipated. These are the things that have been pointed out to the person who duplicated our site system:

1. Copyrighted material is recognizable. If you copy someone’s site, you are using copyrighted material.

2. You may not just be stealing one person’s copyrighted material. You may be using material created by another person, and used by permission by the person you stole from. You do NOT have permission to use it!

3. When you steal software, it may be highly complex. Copyrighted material may be woven into it in places that are difficult for you to detect. The original owner may be able to spot things you do not even know are there.

4. When you steal a website, it is very difficult to get all of the original ownership information out of it. Your site may in fact send mis-directed emails to the original owner without your knowledge.

5. When you steal software, you have no idea what someone else might have changed. If you steal a software site structure, it may have had custom alterations. If you update the software using standard update procedures, you may break something, and not even know where the problem is.

6. If custom alterations have been made to a software site structure, they may be insecure, or they may have introduced bugs that you will have to troubleshoot, and you won’t know where they are coming from in the code.

7. Images can be anywhere in a site, and identifying images may be dropped into places all through it where they can be accessed by direct URL. You will never be able to find them all. You are a sitting duck for a copyright lawsuit.

8. If you steal a website and use it for yourself, it can cause problems. If you steal a website and then use it as the backbone of your services, you are staking your entire reputation on someone else’s stuff. Not only can the original owner sue you, your clients can sue you also. And if the structure is unreliable or unsustainable, your clients will make you pay!

We didn’t have to do anything other than point these things out to the person who copied our system. They are his problem to deal with.

Frankly, I find it much faster and cleaner to just build my own stuff. Stealing other people’s stuff is just too much work!

One of my associates emailed me yesterday, informing me that someone had duplicated my entire vertical market site system for a particular market. Yes, I’m going to name names here.

We build websites for Norwex Consultants (the domain name when this article was written, was norwexwebsites.com – the domain name has since been removed due to changes in the Norwex policies). We have done so for about a year now. We were the original dynamic Norwex shopping cart provider, and we are the most experienced and successful at it.

One of our clients has taken the liberty of partnering with another technician. I think they thought there was an easy goldmine there (little do they know that anything good takes WORK).

Their site, located at http://www.norwex-websites.com (the hyphenated version of our domain name – this website is also no longer valid, though it was at the time this article was written) contained text straight from our site system, and cloned the shopping cart down to the typos. I saw this myself. I was told that he even used MY templates… Badly edited, according to a reliable source. I did not see these for myself, but this woman knows my work, and has seen the templates I created, and future actions of the site owner would tend to lend credibility to her claim.

My friend took the liberty of emailing him, and informing him that he was using copyrighted information, and that it was unethical. This is where it got fun!

Over the next few hours, we watched as parts of his site became unavailable, then came up again, totally different than what they were before.

His entire template gallery disappeared, and then reappeared one page at a time. It is pretty obvious that he thought if I was using Artisteer to create templates, that he could too. He clearly did not spend as much time learning the fine points of creating good templates with it, because the templates were so easily identified as having been created with a template generator, that you really have to feel sorry for the guy. Artisteer is a GREAT program, and the hands of a skilled designer who takes the time to learn how to use the hidden features and who takes the time to create great graphics in PhotoShop ahead of time, can make this program SING. He didn’t. His templates reuse the same images over and over, and they are all identical, with only some color changes. They aren’t even color coordinated, and they do not use the preferred colors of the target market. The layout and design does not change from one to the next, they have the appearance of having been created in a hurry.

Our templates are unique, color coordinated, and attractive, and we have taken great pains to make sure they reflect the mindset of the target market we are serving. We purchase high quality stock photos for each template, and make sure we are using them according to the terms of use – no shortcuts. We know our stuff, and we know what makes sites work. About half of the consultants want our templates as-is, without any changes other than asking for their site name to be added.

Other pages began to disappear and reappear also. Each time, with new content. Must have given him quite a bit of panic. I suggested to him that he might want to make sure that every bit was removed that was ours, whether he thought it was private or not, because if he failed to, he’d never be quite sure which client we sent to purchase a site and check it out for us.

I guess there are three lessons from this.

1. I don’t think there is a reason to feel threatened by competition. I mean, if someone honestly sets up competition against me, go for it. If they do a better job than I, they deserve the success.

This was different than that. We took action, notifying him that he needed to stop using our copyrighted items, because when you copy something of someone else’s it is THEFT, not innovation.

But I am still not worried about competition from this kind of person. I am not a lazy business woman. I did things right, and I took the time where it mattered. I need not fear anyone who takes shortcuts because they lack the understanding of what makes a website really work, and what makes it fail. There are so many points on which he simply cannot compete with us in quality, and where his site falls down on basic marketing messages that he does not pose any real threat to our business. His sales site is so unattractive (this was the first thing one of my students commented on) and so lacking in essential conversion points, that it is doubtful that he will be able to make a sale.

In this instance, he is actually going to do a LOT of marketing for us – because people remember domain names WITHOUT hypens (and search engines pay more attention to the original than to the knock off. Hyphenated names have absolutely NO higher weight with them, they provably parse both with equal accuracy). So a good deal of his marketing will benefit us, but NONE of ours will benefit him!

2. If you do something illegal (by intent, or by being mislead), you are likely to get caught. And when you do, you’ll spend your time running around trying to cover up the evidence, rather than being able to use the time in productive activities that move your business forward. Not only that, but someone may publish the truth of what happened, to which you will have no defense, and it will give your company a black eye, potentially costing you the time you already invested, or more.

3. When someone does something like this, there isn’t a reason to seek revenge. There are legal steps you can take, and the law can provide its own consequence. That is how it should be.

I’ve never had someone blatantly steal something from me in all my years doing business online. I’ve had clients who reported having their sites cloned by someone else, but it has never happened to me. Having it happen with an entire system was rather a surprise.

I’ve actually had a good evening, peeking in periodically to see what is being frantically replaced next. It has been rather amusing, sort of like pulling the strings on a puppet. I’m also writing a few other emails, informing a few other people who need to know, whose work was also involved in the system.

I really sort of feel sorry for the guy… To be so handicapped in business as to think this is a way to get ahead!

Spam is unsolicited email. Spam is illegal. Therefore, we may conclude that any company that sends you unsolicited email advertisements for their services is breaking the law. We may further conclude that their primary aim is NOT to help your company to grow.

This little piece of logic seems to be set aside each time we receive spam email that contains something we are hoping might be true. That a company that is breaking the law really DOES want to help us get to the top of the search engines. That a company that is breaking the law will honor their word. That a company that is breaking the law somehow will give us what we want at a lower price and higher value than good companies that DON’T break the law.

Sometimes I think there is just a disconnect. We forget to think of it in those terms.

The rule is one you may depend upon to keep from getting ripped off by email scams. If it came through the email, and you did not ASK for it specifically, it is Spam, it is illegal, and the company that sent it is either too ignorant, or too dishonest for there to be any kind of good outcome if you risk it.

Some companies may be sending from outside the US, where it may not be illegal. But… consider…. Do you want a company to work for you, promoting your company worldwide, that is not aware of the laws of your own country? We have actually seen such companies do things on behalf of site owners that were huge legal risks in the US, and which are likely to come back and harm the site owners. If you pay them to do something, then you may also be held liable for any misrepresentation, false statements, or claims that they make on your behalf. If they are ethical, and want US business, they’ll take the time to learn, and RESPECT, the laws of the US.

SEO scams are one of the most rampant, we have businesses contacting us almost daily about this, asking us whether it works or not. Oh, some of them will do the tasks they say they will do. But they do them SO BADLY, that they don’t do you any good at all. You will be throwing money down a hole – and in some cases, the things they do can actually HURT your business. Many other scams are not just false on the end, they are false right from the get-go. They will take your financial information and abuse it with no pretense of delivery of anything.

It doesn’t matter WHO the business is. If they send you an ad, and you did not sign up for it FROM THEM, or if you did not ask a question on a forum that they replied to (and mentioned the forum), or if a friend did not introduce you, or something else that tracks them to a known source, it is illegal for them to send you the ad!

I bombed two weeks of computer classes in high school. Ok, it was really a math class, but the teacher took liberties and immersed us in command line for two weeks (TRS-80s). I wallowed. Could not figure it out, and HATED it. Swore at that point that I’d never touch another computer as long as I lived. I had no use for them AT ALL.

About 1994 my father-in-law gifted us a Mac Classic. Kevin was a teacher at the time, and he took right to it. To my utter shock, I did too. I began writing poetry and short stories. I sought out freeware and shareware games for my kids – educational stuff. After about six months, I reformatted the hard drive just to see if I could. I was hired as a computer aide at a local school, and within a few years, was buying, refurbishing, and reselling Macs (desktops and laptops). I could quote you the specs of any Mac model off the top of my head.

There was something about the Mac. I could actually USE it. And using a Mac early on in my computer business career taught me some valuable lessons, which have been part of shaping our business into something both original and successful.

1. Don’t make it harder than it has to be. Keep things simple on the surface, and leave the layers of complication for later.

2. Make it fun. The Mac was a lot of fun. There were hidden messages and games in many of the programs (nicknamed Easter Eggs). The computer greeted you with a smile. Mac instructions were written with a sense of humor (David Pogue’s were some of the best, in Macs for Dummies). You could change the desktop patterns and even make your own (remember, all of this was brand new concepts at the time, Bill Gates was still trying to mimic it).

3. Think Different. More than different – think about needs, and meet them, instead of being trapped by rigid standards arbitrated by those who really don’t get what the needs actually are.

4. Don’t be afraid to use what works, regardless of what everyone else is doing. I defended my position to use a Mac over and over, and it taught me to do what worked for MY business, and not be made to feel inadequate because I wasn’t doing it the way someone else thought I should.

5. Meet higher standards. The Mac had higher customer satisfaction standards than PCs had. They also had higher compatibility and performance standards. They met them too.

6. When you make changes to keep up with technology or growth, don’t lose what makes it work. The Mac fell apart when they made some decisions that lost many of the things users loved about it. It lost some of the humor, much of the reliability, and much of what made it unique. The end came for us when they released an operating system that was incompatible with the firmware (part of the built-in hardware coding) on our Mac, combined with a decrease in available software for our industry. We moved to the PC because the Mac no longer had what we needed – It did not matter that the iMac was cute and colored, the hard drive crashed repeatedly and had to be reformatted due to the incompatibility. It was unsustainable.

7. Just because you screw up once, or twice, or even a dozen times, doesn’t mean you can’t make a comeback. While we haven’t gone back to the Mac (it would be prohibitively expensive for us to do so now), an increasing number of our clients and students have done so.

The Mac was responsible for a huge learning process for me. It took all of my half-talents, and combined them together into a combination of skills which had value. And Mac instructions were so much clearer than PC instructions (which always seemed to assume you already KNEW what you were doing and only needed a reminder of a single concept). In fact, I learned more from Macs for Dummies, More Macs for Dummies, and Mac Secrets, about how to operate and diagnose a PC than I did from a huge combination of PC books. Because I learned more foundational computer concepts, and I learned more practical applied troubleshooting concepts, which I could then adapt to the PC.

I function using a PC. But it isn’t fun, and I miss my Mac. I don’t know if it will ever be feasible to go back. But I appreciate the lessons I learned from it. The whole philosophy of the Mac had a huge impact on how I thought about business, and has helped to take me someplace extraordinary.

This is the average process I go through lately to edit a page for a client.

1. Type in the URL.
2. Wait for 30 to 45 seconds for the page to load on average. Often this may take as long as 2 full minutes.
3. About 3 out of 5 times, the page will fail to load completely. About half of the page load failures are incomplete loads, and about half are “Failure to Connect” notices.
4. Make changes when the page finally loads, click Save. Go through the frustrating page load process again, hoping the changes are not lost.

This is a daily aggravation. We have two satellite dishes on the site of our house. One from Wild Blue that costs us $69 per month. One from HughesNet that costs us $79 per month. Each is so unreliable that we have to have a backup – that is more than $150 per month for internet once taxes are figured in.

WildBlue was adequate when we first got it – but we outgrew it fairly rapidly. And they have no options for growth beyond a certain point. When you hit the ceiling, they simply shut you down until your usage comes back in range – and that can take 3 weeks or more.

We got HughesNet in an emergency, and it was good at first. Their limits work differently than WB, so we’re never shut down for long if we exceed bandwidth. But lately, we’re having to be really careful what we do, because we’ve outgrown them too. We can get faster speeds, but we cannot get more bandwidth. When we first signed up with them, they had a higher bandwidth option. But they’ve since decreased the available options, and we have no place left to grow.

And the worst is that both companies have degraded seriously in performance. WildBlue is now behaving like they’ve throttled us, when we have NOT exceeded bandwidth. The performance is hideous – pages don’t load at all, and email takes forever to download. It is completely unacceptable, we are not getting anywhere near what we pay for, we aren’t even getting USABLE internet most of the time now.

HughesNet is also apalling lately. If you call them, they will run you through diagnostics, tell you you have to be reporting the wrong numbers (which are so slow their own techs cannot even believe they are real), and then wander off – they do follow up a few days later in hopes that the problem has miraculously solved itself. It never does. Our friends who also use HN have called about the slow speeds, and have been told they exceeded their bandwidth, when they have not even USED the internet in the last 48 hours! (HN has a 24 hour revolving limit.)

I ran some diagnosics recently, and they returned latency speeds that were 5 times longer than dialup speeds. This isn’t the speed of the upload or download data, rather this is the delay between the request from my computer, and the response from the other end. Often there simply is no response at all, so the browser returns a failure to connect error.

It is clear that both have vastly overloaded their satellites, and no longer care about usability for their clients. We are losing money on both – if we had an alternative, we’d be gone in a shot. I believe they make their money from people who accept it because they have no choice. The dumb thing is, many people would pay more for decent service – we would if we had the option, because our business is entirely dependent on good internet access. It is very frustrating to have no choices at all. It hurts our business, and there is nothing we can do about it.

It looks like an alternative is coming. We have two companies which will be bringing in high speed internet options soon. We’ll test them, and assuming performance is even a little better, HN and WB will be dropped. Sadly, a year ago, we’d have known we’d drop WB first, and keep HN as a backup. At this point, there is nothing to choose between the two, they are both so bad that neither is even good enough for a backup!

I don’t expect this post to change anything. The net is littered with negative comments on both of these companies. They do not listen when you contact customer support, so I doubt they are concerned with a negative reputation online either. They should be – internet options are growing for small towns across the US, and if they do not get their act together, they will simply fade out of existence.

Circumstances in my business have given me a lot of reason to think about customer service, satisfaction policies, and refund policies. Having always felt that a business owner gives MORE, not LESS, and having been raised on the philosophy that you just accept hardship and cope with it, it has taken a great deal of thought, and reasoning to create some new policies which set a limit on how far certain types of clients can push me.

We charge flat rates, so we often have to set limits on what can and cannot be done within a contract. With the average client, a polite, “I’m sorry, but the technical difficulty of that feature is beyond what your contract covers” is enough to let them know where that limit is. And typically, we don’t have to issue refunds, because when problems are encountered, we can address them and help the client move past them.

Two situations recently made me start really thinking about when the customer ISN’T right, and when a refund should NOT be issued. Those are hard things for me to define, and I dislike it intensely when someone is displeased with the outcome. But when the problem is not one that I caused, but which the client brought on themselves, I am not responsible for making it right.

In one situation, the demands of the client became such that it was interferring with my ability to keep up with work for all of my clients. I eventually said NO, because it was unfair to the rest of my clients for one client to demand so much time and work that it was impossible to keep up with the reasonable requests of the others. I had one dissatisfied client. But to satisfy that one, I’d have had a dozen dissatisfied clients. And it needs to be stated, that this involved a fairly low priced contract, for which I had already delivered about 5-7 times the amount of work agreed on. This client would make requests that wasted time, and think nothing of it. “Just make two copies of that graphic so I can compare them and decide which one I like.” or “I don’t have the right text or image yet, just make one up so I can see what it might look like.” Those things waste time, and cost extra work that is not reasonable when time is not charged hourly.

In the other situation, the client asked and was informed about the amount of work their part of the contract would entail. They assured with enthusiasm that they were up to it, and were ready to get it done quickly. This was a half-priced contract where we were responsible only for install, design, payment processor setup, and support – we would do personal training on request at no extra charge. The client began the work, then lost interest, and changed their mind. We offered a training session – which they scheduled, then canceled. They then accused us of not informing them of the amount of work needed (which we had done both in person and in writing), and demanded a full refund of all money paid. Since we did not have a refund policy for this specific service, we looked at our general policies (which they had agreed to during the payment process), and offered a refund based on those terms. This meant half of the setup fee was refundable. The client said that was not acceptable, that they had never agreed to any such thing, and that we needed to refund the whole thing or they’d file a complaint with the payment company. We promptly refunded the amount of half of the setup fee, as we had stated we would, and informed them that they HAD in fact agreed, showed them the document, and informed them that since the services agreed on HAD been completed and delivered, and that there was no issue of either non-delivery, or misrepresentation of services, they had no justifiable reason to file a complaint.

In both instances, there were strong reasons for setting a limit with the client, in spite of having strong customer service ethics. It came down to sustainability and what is reasonable and fair. To satisfy ONE client in this instance, would have done long term harm to our business.

In the first instance, keeping this client and answering all his demands would have undermined our entire business. We over delivered, and he got far more than his money’s worth. He was angry that I refused to do more without additional pay. But this, again, was not something we caused, and was beyond reason to expect on his part. It was better to have one dissatisfied client than to allow one client to destroy our business.

In the second instance, we were dealing with a situation that we did not cause – in fact, we try very hard to ensure that clients purchasing that type of product KNOW that it will take work. She changed her mind. That wasn’t something we caused. This is a service for a direct sales company. Had we just given the refund to make her go away without being upset, then she would tell her downline to go ahead and order a site from us, that if they changed their mind, we would refund. That would do a lot of harm long term. We were fair and honest with her, and the problems were not things we caused, and we offered several options to try to help her overcome the problems, but she did not want to even try.

I really struggled with figuring out the appropriate thing to do in both of these situations. In normal circumstances, I am more than willing to go out of my way for a client, and to do more than they paid for. We typically include a certain amount of wiggle room in our flat rate quotes, and I expect to have to work hard for what I earn. I generally LIKE my clients and want to give a lot for them. But there also has to be a limit. Otherwise a business is not sustainable.

Because of these two clients, I now have a new refund policy for the one particular service, and I have a new guideline for myself, to know when it is better to “fire the client” than it is to continue working with them. Neither of those things are handled lightly – I never want a dissatisfied client if I can avoid it. But I also recognize that some clients never WILL be satisfied, and that beyond a certain point, it is THEIR choice, not mine. When I have done all I should have done, and more, then it is ok to let them be unhappy, and to walk away. It still isn’t a nice thing to have to deal with, and I don’t think I will ever be able to do that without a lot of thought and analysis of the situation, to make sure that I was in the right in doing what I did.

I don’t know if I have a point in all of this, except to share the experience and maybe the bit that I did get out of it. If I have a point, it is maybe that when you ARE doing it right, this kind of decision generally WON’T be easy. It wll always cause thought and discomfort. But that lines must be drawn for problem clients, to keep the business sustainable for the GOOD clients.

When you did not cause it, and when you did more than was reasonable to try to make it work, it is ok to let the client choose to be dissatisfied.