If you’re trying to decide on a design for your website, it is certainly a good idea to look at other websites for inspiration. Same goes for when you’re trying to figure out how you should implement a certain feature. Again, it’s fine to look at others’ solutions, but then you need to come up with your own. Often times, websites will include a copyright at the bottom of the page. But even without that claim, replicating the features of someone’s design, or copying and pasting their code clash with their intellectual property rights.
Some coders actually include comments in their code declaring that the creation belongs to them, or they may add a useless section of code that they add to everything they make to prove it is theirs—sort of like personal identification.
Many designers and developers are willing to give advice and code solution samples on forums. And some will even create templates and widgets (small interactive applications) that they freely share for people to use, sometimes in hopes that people will help them improve upon it.
Resources and tutorials are available online for web designers new to the game. With web designs, copyright infringement usually becomes more of an issue when business and complex coding solutions are involved. Regardless, a designer’s personal, hard work should not be misappropriated.
