Remember when I told you about our wedding website? About all the time I spent, looking for the perfect platform to use? How proud I was of all the resources available for our guests that I'd written out, rewritten, and tweaked until the result was perfect?
Well apparently someone else thought it was perfect too.
A high school classmate of B's got engaged this past summer, and will be getting married in July. We recently received their Save the Date, which included a link to their wedding website, so I went online to check it out, excited to learn more about their big day. The more I saw, the angrier I became. It was clear to me almost at once that she had used our site as a rubric for her own. On the surface, that fact doesn't bother me. It is a testament to the awesomeness of our site, right? However, the extent of the copying was astonishing.
Let's take a look at the evidence, shall we?
Her site: About Us page: About the bride, About the groom, How it began, and an Our Proposal page
Granted, those are pretty standard sections on any wedding website. Yes, they were structured almost identical to ours, and included a lot of the same details, but there weren't a lot of alarms going off in my head quite yet. But as I continued, I noticed a few other similarities:
Our site: A block of rooms have been reserved for your convenience at the following hotels:
Her site: A block of hotel rooms have been reserved for your convenience at:
Granted, this could be a coincidence, however the words "for your convenience" were a deliberate choice I made after trying out a few alternate options, and so when I saw them on hers I started to think something fishy was going on.
Our site: Here are some ideas for fun and family-friendly things to do
Our site: Here are some ideas for fun and family-friendly things to do
in the Sioux Falls area while you're in town for our wedding:
Her site: Family-friendly fun while you're in Sioux Falls
This was clearly stolen from our site. Wedding websites on The Knot don't offer a page devoted to Local Attractions, so she just added it to the end of her accommodations page. And unless she's as fond of alliteration as I am, that "family-friendly fun" phrase was definitely not of her own design.
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Now, those few things on their own? A little frustrating, but nothing I would have gotten too worked up about. The part that really upset me, however (and we're talking hands shaking with anger), was that some parts were clearly copy and pasted directly from our website, with no effort made to alter them whatsoever! I mean, she didn't even bother to change the font style and color to match the rest of her own website. The default text on her site was Comic Sans MS, with headings in red and body text in black. In various places around her site, however, there are occasional purple headings and Georgia fonts, which were used on our site:
And look at all the formatting errors on the page - how does that not drive her crazy?! Seeing my work pasted carelessly into another person's website just makes me so sad and angry and cheated all at the same time. Isn't there a law against bridal plagiarism?!
I know, I know. It's a trivial thing to get upset about, but honestly - I'm pretty peeved. Mainly because I put a lot of blood, sweat and tears into that project and yet she's getting married before we are and will get the credit for my hard work. It just doesn't seem fair, that's all.
Have aspects of your wedding been plagiarized? How did it make you feel?
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