Fine Gael rips off BBC website

BBC    

BBC

 

Fine Gael

Fine Gael

Coz I’m a person who lives and breathes CSS from 9 to 5 I decided to dig a little deeper and boy was I surprised to see that their developers didn’t even bother to change the class names in the CSS files. 

BBC CSS file (sorry about quality)

BBC CSS file (sorry about quality)

 

Fine Gael CSS (again sorry about quality)

Fine Gael CSS (again sorry about quality)

Unreal. See www.finegael.org and www.bbc.co.uk for yourself.

Update: To prove I’m not a nut, I’ve just pulled copies of both CSS files to my local machine & made a lickle video too :)  

Update @11.20,  16/4/09: Seems www.finegael.org is now down completely. Stewart did some file comparing before the site went down, check the results here (thanks Stu). A web developer for the BBC has also added his comments. Had a chuckle to myself on the way to Handel’s Messiah at Christchurch reading the press release that went out to Fine Gael mailing list subscribers (which I have been since meeting Enda Kenny a few weeks back and him saying a new site was in the pipes). I’ll be emailing members of FG tomorrow to voice my views & following up on this post. I simply haven’t had time today. 

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53 Comments

  1. Posted April 27, 2009 at 1:41 pm | Permalink

    Holy TimesNewRoman batman! That seems to be the only style difference, and what a horrible one! That second GetaFreelancer.com project has been deleted already. They know they’ve messed up.

  2. Posted May 22, 2009 at 10:46 pm | Permalink

    hmm… strange

  3. Posted August 25, 2009 at 2:42 pm | Permalink

    Great… thanks so much

12 Trackbacks

  1. [...] Read Steph for the full technical details on the rip off! [...]

  2. By Red Links 16/04/09 : Alexia Golez on April 16, 2009 at 4:27 pm

    [...] finds the new Fine Gael site  looks a lot like the BBC [...]

  3. [...] So, the big question of the day is, did Fine Gael steal from Auntie? Click [...]

  4. [...] via Suzy the new website is currently housed at finegael.org. Minutes after Suzy leaked the url, Steph has done the background and it looks like the site is a basic cog of BBC.co.uk (which is clear if [...]

  5. By DeveLinks - 17-04-2009 | Ross Duggan on April 17, 2009 at 5:34 pm

    [...] How Not To Redesign a Political Website – blog post from Steph highlighting just how similar the new FG site is to the BBC site. Talk about caught with your pants down. [...]

  6. By Maman Poulet » Cheap Job, Badly Done. on April 19, 2009 at 12:00 pm

    [...] by this stage Steph had released examples of code, a video of how it was discovered and closed the case on the fact that the site design was a rip [...]

  7. [...] has been reasonably well covered in the Irish Blogoshpere, and the whistle was blown by iamsteph, but I thought the rest of you would like to know about it [...]

  8. [...] @cloudsteph posted on their blog, the CSS class name values were exactly the same as the BBC  website, which another developer from [...]

  9. [...] and the original post on Maman Poulet. Steph, a web designer and developer whose blog may be found here observes: “Their developers didn’t even bother to change the class names in the CSS [...]

  10. [...] hold on shouted the Irish blogosphere, doesn’t this site look alot like the BBC [...]

  11. By Maman Poulet » Anyone seen Paschal? on September 8, 2009 at 10:35 am

    [...] I know Fine Gael head office don’t like members of their party blogging or tweeting or doing anything online (they only like using other peoples templates some might say!) [...]

  12. By Digest – Jan 31 2010 – The Story on January 31, 2010 at 9:26 pm

    [...] Gael senator, Paschal Donohue. An insane figure. Question: if it was Fine Gael in charge would they just hired in cheap Russian freelancers and used the intellectual property of another organisation (then attempted to pretend they didn’tanything of the sort) to keep the website running? Fair [...]

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