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Stolen Websites: How to Protect Your Site

June 4, 2009 By Regina Fried Leave a Comment

You’ve worked hard to create your website. Now it’s available for all the world to see. Unfortunately, some people will also believe it’s available to steal. Here are some ways to protect yourself against website theft.

  1. Copyscape: use Copyscape to search for copies of your web content. If you discover someone is using your work and passing it off as their own, dive into Copyscape’s list of resources and suggestions for what to do if you discover you’ve been plagirized. Place a Copyscape banner on your website pages. This does not protect your work, but it does discourage would-be thieves.
  2. Place a copyright notice at the end of each blog posting: “Copyright [year] [your name]. All Rights Reserved. Look at the end of this posting, and you’ll see my copyright.
  3. The folks at WordPress suggest using a more-detailed copyright notice on your blog, stating what uses you will and won’t allow. I’ve placed this copyright in my sidebar. If you do not want excerpts of your work used, you can modify the notice to remove that language. This article also includes some other great ideas for protecting your work and gives suggestions on what to do if your work has been stolen.
  4. There are good suggestions in an article at Freelance Switch, including a novel use of Google Alerts: “… choose one or more phrases that are relatively unique to your work, place them in quotes and set up a Google Alert to notify you automatically when a match is found.”
  5. Use watermarks on your images. Other suggestions can be found on this posting from Web Resources Depot.

While there are no guarantees that your work won’t be stolen, taking some, or all, of these steps should help. And should the worst occur, you can follow these steps to recover your website property.

Copyright 2010 Regina Fried. All Rights Reserved.

Filed Under: All Things Web, WordPress, Writing Tagged With: blog, Google, Images, web content

Image Search – Beyond Stock Photos

March 25, 2009 By Regina Fried Leave a Comment

If you need images for a project, you have a lot of affordable options. Why then, do so many of the images used on websites and marketing materials look exactly the same? Without breaking the budget, how do you find graphics that help you stand out — not blend in?

Popular stock photography sites like iStockPhoto and Fotolia offer images starting at $1.00. But many of their graphics look similar and have that unmistakable “stock” look.

The next time you need to do an image search, use Creative Commons and Flickr to find free images that don’t fit the “stock mold.”

To start a search, go to the Creative Commons search page and enter your search term. In addition to a general search, you can limit your options to works that can be used commercially or works you can modify. Select one of these modifiers if you’d like. Hit “go” and your search results should appear. If you do not get a list of Flickr photographs, make sure you have selected the Flickr tab (this is the default).

If you find an image(s) you want to use, give attribution to the photographer who took it. Many of the images I’ve used on this site were found on Flickr; you’ll notice that I give credit and provide a link to the original image location.

Finally, a note to you Firefox users: the search box of this browser has a drop-down menu — click on it, and you’ll see that Creative Commons is there. You can begin your Creative Commons/Flickr search without navigating to the Creative Commons site.

Filed Under: All Things Web Tagged With: free, Images