BBC
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)
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.
Don’t steal! The government hates competition!
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All your CSS are belong to us!
Stephen: Are you aware at all of the concept of copyright? I don’t know if it has ever been tested, but it would be likely that non-trivial CSS would be considered a copyrightable work.
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Seems to be back online now and looking even more like the BBC site that it did before.
The website is one of the worst “clones” i have seen. I work as a developer who has worked on many Irish Government and EU websites. If I delivered work like this I wouldn’t be employed.
This website hasn’t been thought through at all, just a slapdash rip off of the BBC website to look impressive, the result it doesn’t look impressive and the content is a complete mess, the menu’s/content taxonomy don’t make sense.
An Irish state body would not be allowed to launch such a website as it’s completely inaccessible and full of crap “hacky” code.
Accessibility Snapshot:
http://wave.webaim.org/report?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.finegael.org
Validation Errors:
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=www.finegael.org&charset=(detect+automatically)&doctype=Inline&group=0
What fine gael need to do is hire a proper company who have a track record of delivering a website of this scale and complexity, who will plan the content in an acceptable manner and deliver it in an accessible way. Developing this in house… they obviously don’t have the skills for a Parish Church Website.
This might sound a bit dramatic, but it would put me off voting FG, the denials and trying to justify theft is a joke.
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.
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hmm… strange
Great… thanks so much
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I do not even know the way I ended up here, but I believed this post was good. I don’t understand who you might be but certainly you are going to a well-known blogger in case you aren’t already
Cheers!
Great article! Keep me posted with your progress!