… and the lifeblood of intellectual property lawsuits.
I saw this post on Freelancer.com last night and wasn’t quite sure whether we should be flattered, indignant or just plain amused.
Here’s the salient part of the post:
I want a clone website of www.mypropertyforsale.co.uk with all the funtionallity that it has but with a worldwide search and the website must be in two language English and spanish. I want everything done by the winning bidder because I don´t know anything about this, I don´t want any question about the funtionallity nor information needed for completing any task neither.
I should point out that www.mypropertyforsale.co.uk is a site that we developed at work and have an ongoing interest in, so seeing someone ask for coders to rip it off makes me want to put a call in to the lawyers. On closer inspection though it is actually quite amusing.
Firstly, the poster is offering up to $1,500 to replicate a site that would cost at least twenty times that to do properly. This just backs up his own statement I don´t know anything about this. The spelling too is quite interesting for someone hoping to produce an international property website.
I also like the fact that he apparently doesn’t want the developers to ask him any questions about functionality. Considering MPFS is one of the most complex sites that we work on and what the public see is about 20% of the total project, this made me grin. We’ve probably spent at least 200 hours discussing functionality of this site with the client, yet the poor sod who stumbles into a lawsuit by ripping it off is expect to get this same information from two paragraphs of brief!
I am sure that there must be a few more of these around if we look. For the last year we must have received at least one enquiry a week from someone who has seen the site and wants us to do them a copy. As we work continually on MPFS we wouldn’t take a competing job on anyway, but these people don’t seem to realise that they have missed the boat on this by at least two years. With players like Channel4 and Tesco now hitting the same market all the clone sites appearing are going to have to have some serious money behind them and a spot on system on launch to even survive a year let alone turn a profit.
At the moment we seem to be spotting at least one or two new sites, based on the same concept, appearing each month. I think that we found about 80 of them when we last looked and there are still only a tiny handful worth the time of creating an advert for even if they are free.
2 Comments
There are a lot of new ‘for sale by owner’ sites popping up all over the place now. Many look like they have been done for a budget of £1500. To get a site that looks professional you will unfortunately have to dig deeper in to your wallet. Most of these sites are ‘off the shelf’ templates with poor graphics and poor functionality. The above site [spammy link drop removed] is the only recent addition that looks like they have spent a realistic budget on it. At the end of the day as with everything in life you get what you pay for and work for. If someone wants a professional site for a low budget and is not willing to put any work into it there is not an awful lot you say apart from good luck and goodbye.
Sorry - gratuitous link drop removed. Let’s work together to keep this blg spam free ;)
It seems to be slowing down now, but at one point we were seeing 1 new for sale by owner website springing up every week. The huge majority never get enough properties on to reach a critical mass (piss poor marketing strategies… you aren’t going to outbid established sites drawing real income on adwords!).
Still lots springing up though and even more people looking in to it thinking it is easy money. We probably get 2 or 3 enquiries to build similar sites every month.
With regards to the link dropped site, it looks OK but I have to say that I don’t see anything there that would give me great confidence in it’s ability to make a meaningful impression on the market. Good luck to the owners, I hope it will, but it will take more to market it than link dropping in blogs!