Comin'OutSwingin said:
I was asking for clarification of DickTees.net's post. Hence, the question mark. I wasn't sure what he was saying. He says that copying is a common practice and if I wanted to do copy code to go for it. I didn't ask if it was okay to do it in order to learn. jdr8271, says it's not standard practice and wrong to do. I was just trying to get a better understanding of what dicktees.net said. Again, a question, not a statement.
I understand, and my post was to help clarify the points that were made
jdr was saying that you can get ideas from other sites and combine elements to make your own unique design, but don't copy directly and use it on your site.
dicktees basically said the same thing in different words. He mentioned copying javascript (which many folks do and there are entire sites for getting javascript code).
He also said that copying a website could be a good way to learn how the page is put together:
dicktees said:
If you want to go out and copy code from an entire page, change out all the text and graphics to make it your own I'd say go for it. This is not how I prefer to work but it could be a good way to learn how pages are put together.
(I put that part in bold)
Seems like everyone is just about saying the same thing in different words from different perspectives.
Don't just copy a site and change the graphics/text and upload it can call it your site.
If you are learning out to layout a site or learning HTML, some people have had success by looking at the source of sites they like and seeing how the webpage was put together and laid out. When they actually designed their own site, they changed the layout to make it unique to their site.
In my opinion, from an ethical standpoint, you should just come up with something that is unique for you. That doesn't mean you have to reinvent the wheel (some parts of a website like navigation bars, etc are standard), but try to make your site unique.
For example: I've seen a few sites that have the same "style" as bustedtees (simple main page rows of square product thumbnails for you to click on to take you to the product page...navigation across the top), but each seems to add something unique to the design to make it their own (for the most part). I'm not sure who did it "first", but it is clearly an easy way to display a large number of t-shirt designs to allow the shopper to easily scan and see if a product catches their eye.