10 things you need to know about copyright on the web

Just because an article, image or video is posted online doesn’t mean that it’s free for all to use. Rules governing what is and is not ok to copy still apply to the digital landscape, just as they apply to any other form of media or publication. Online copyright is an important issue and shouldn’t be ignored.

Here are my top ten facts that you need to know about copyright on the internet.

1. Your work is covered!

Copyright is an automatic right and arises whenever an individual or company creates an original piece of work that demonstrates a degree of skill or judgement.  This includes web site design, web site content and web site imagery. Software and computer programmes are protected as literary works and databases are covered for 15 years from publication.

2. Taking ownership

Ownership of the work is usually granted to the website’s creator. However, this is usually transferred on receipt of payment if the work is produced by a third party.

Make sure everyone involved understands and agrees to the ownership - only the owner of the work can bring infringement proceedings to court.

3. Mark your work

Although there’s no legal requirement to include a copyright symbol on your work (because it’s covered regardless of whether you choose to mark it in this way or not), it’s strongly recommended that you provide a copyright notice on all pages of the website. It’s also worth considering including a copyright notice to images, CSS, html, and other key files that can be downloaded.  Adding notices will make it clear that copyright exists and deter potential infringement. The most effective and widely accepted format for this is ‘Copyright © year author name’.

4. Make a statement

Along with your copyright notice, it’s important to provide a copyright statement. This should be a straightforward declaration – don’t get tied up with legal jargon - the point is to state your wishes clearly and succinctly. The most common example used online is:  ‘All rights reserved’. This is simple and covers most eventualities - it simply means that you withhold all rights to the maximum extent allowed under the copyright law.

5. Copyright has an expiration date

Although this is not yet an issue for web designers because the internet has only existed since 1992, it’s important to be aware that copyright protection is only valid for 70 years after the death of the creator or company.

When copyright expires, the work will fall into the public domain, making it available to anyone wishing to reuse, copy or reproduce. 

6. What counts as infringement?

It’s an offence to copy the work, issue copies to the public or adapt it in any way without the consent of the owner.

7. Fair dealing/Fair use

The following acts are permitted to a certain degree without infringing copyright:

• Private and research study purposes
• Use for educational purposes
• Criticism and news reporting
• Incidental inclusion
• Acts for the purposes of royal commissions, statutory enquiries, judicial proceedings and parliamentary purposes
• Producing a backup copy for personal use of a computer program.

8. Detecting and dealing with infringement

There are many tools and services that offer help to tackle copyright abuse. Copyscape is a useful tool that will compare your web pages to others indexed by Google and return any it finds with matching text. 

The UK Copyright Service offers some great advice on how you can deal with possible infringement of your work.

9. Always ask permission

Whether you want to use a photograph or illustration, a quote or sound file, you need to ask permission.

Always allow time for this process - you shouldn’t use someone else’s work until you have gained their permission. There’s no guarantee that you will be granted use and, in some cases, you may be asked for a payment in exchange. 

When you ask for permission, you should include the following information:

• A full description of the work you wish to use
• How the work will be used. Give specific details of any changes to the work, and assurances that the work will not be used to mislead, slander, or portrait the author in a bad light
• Provide assurances that the work will be properly attributed
• Include full contact details to ensure that you can be contacted in case of any questions.

10. Infringement Consequences

If you use work without permission, and the copyright owner finds out, they may wish to take action against you for infringement. This could mean that you’re required to pay damages for any lost royalties and legal costs.

Written by Ally Wright 

Crafted announces the launch of hearthstone.co.uk

We’re pleased to announce the launch of hearthstone.co.uk, a website for the specialist residential property fund manager. 

Hearthstone Investments provides access to FSA authorised collective investment opportunities in residential for a range of investors, from individuals with ISAs and SIPPs to corporate and local government pension schemes. The new website coincides with the launch of a £22.5 million seed investment deal, backed by Barratt Developments, in which the house builder will contribute a portfolio of show homes to be licensed back to the company.

Following a competitive pitch, we were awarded the project based on our demonstrable competencies in the financial services marketplace and our ability to deliver a full service solution. Crafted undertook a full redesign and build of hearthstone.co.uk to replace the firm’s existing interim website.

A key requirement of the website was to easily lead each target audience, from private investors to institutional investors and property professionals, through the available information, ensuring that each was well educated about the fund. This was vital in order to enable visitors to be appropriately informed and meet legal requirements regarding financial advice. Crafted achieved this by incorporating a self-selection process into the homepage and building an obvious flow to hand-hold the user through the information screens. To soften the information-heavy page on consumer channels, we also used treated photography to highlight the focus on housing.

Built on the Kentico CMS platform, for which Crafted is a Gold Partner, content managers from Hearthstone are able to make comprehensive updates to the website which can be published within fixed timeframes and maintain a history of edit dates and times for compliance purposes.

The TM Hearthstone UK Residential Property fund will launch fully this September. 

Crafted shortlisted for prestigious DADI Awards

We’re delighted to announce that Crafted has been nominated in the B2B Sector Website or Campaign at the DADI Awards.

We’ve been recognised for our design, build and content production for business community platform inspiresme.co.uk (a Workspace project) by modern marketing magazine, The Drum. We’ll find out if we’ll take home gold in November at a black tie ceremony at London’s Emirates Stadium.

Workspace tasked Crafted with creating and maintaining platform for start-ups and growing businesses that breaks the mould of traditional SME advisory websites. inspiresme.co.uk empowers businesses to network and share peer-to-peer advice with other companies in a brand new way - according to geography, industry or business associates – encouraging business generation between SMEs.

Crafted is one of just four nominations for the B2B Sector Website or Campaign award.

Trends in web design part two: 2012 and onwards

On Monday, I ran through a brief history of web design, from the early 90s until the present day. In today's post, I'd like to dicuss some of the current trends impacting web design and what these mean for the future.

2012 and onwards

"Design trends online change more often than the wind, and slightly less often than my socks."  - Suleiman Leadbitter

While web technologies continue to break boundaries and influence web design trends, we must also consider and reflect this in our designs. Although advances and trends are changing all the time, listed below are a few things we will be seeing more of:

1.Web-fonts

Until recently designers were limited to just 10 fonts: Arial, Georgia, Lucida Sans, Palatino, Tahoma, Times, Trebuchet and Verdana.

But with the advent of stable services like Typekit, Fontdeck and Google Fonts we now have access to thousands of fonts with more being added on a daily basis.

This means that we can now render readable text that would have previously needed to be images in the past. We can now use typography to create visual impact, while retaining any SEO benefit, producing faster load times than images, and maintaining accessibility for screen readers and other tactile devices.

2. Responsive web design

"Now more than ever, we’re designing work meant to be viewed along a gradient of different experiences. Responsive web design offers us a way forward, finally allowing us to “design for the ebb and flow of things.”

We are now experiencing the internet on a variety of devices. Televisions, smart phones, tablets, as well as laptops and desktop computers. Responsive design is a good example of how web design can cater for all of these devices and become future proof to a certain degree.

In the simplest form, responsive web design means changing the values that we used to use to define things on the web (px, pt, em) into percentages. This means that a responsive layout will display on any size screen at the correct ratio to each other and fill that screen.

"A website that responds to the device that accesses it and delivers the appropriate output for it uses responsive design. Rather than designing multiple sites for different-sized devices, this approach designs one site but specifies how it should appear on varied devices."

Simply put, it's about percentages not pixels.

It also means that we can now target desktops, tablets and phones with the same set of code and the same content. This offers an obvious benefit for users and clients.

3. CSS3 and HTML5

"CSS3 and HTML5 are the latest agreed standards for technologies that have built the web since it's inception. They bring new tools for designers, devs and SEOs to play with. Including webfonts and responsive design."

Now both web fonts and responsive web design are made possible by CSS3:

1. Box-shadows – Allows for drop shadows to be made without images
2. Text shadows – A drop shadow underneath HTML text elements.
3. Easier font additions – Use any font uploaded to your server or via font servers like Typekit
4. Multiple backgrounds – Overlaying multiple backgrounds to a page is possible.
5. Border images – Upload an image to use as a border.
6. Opacity levels – Make elements transparent.
7. RGBA colouring – Use RGB colour values rather than hex codes to produce colours.
8. Transform – Resize and rotate elements within the code.
9. Rounded corners – Corners that are rounded rather than using images.

HTML5 fun includes:

1. Drag and drop - Allows elements from users computer to be dragged into web browser and interacted with. eg file upload
2. Native audio and video - Allows video and audio to play without plugins
3. Form features - Validation without javascript and new expanded form options, including things like date pickers, sliders, validation, placeholders and multiple file uploads
4. Offline support - Method of defining web page files to be cached allowing them to work offline
5. SVG - Display and play with vector graphics rather than bitmap images

In conclusion

Since the first web page in 1991, the function of a web site has shifted. No longer is it solely about sharing information. More often than not, it's about getting results.

As designers, we always have this in mind. Design isn’t just about creating something beautiful. It's about guiding the user effectively through information, encouraging them to sign up, make a purchase, or make an enquiry and so on.

This tailoring of information and correct use of trends is why many of our clients choose Crafted over more basic, ‘off the shelf’ platforms. We not only have the ability to create a visually appealing experience for the user, we can also drive traffic, increase conversion and produce results.

We do this by working with web trends and technology, being receptive to all that influences design and endeavouring to push our abilities further with each project.

Written by Ally Wright

Trends in web design part one: the history of web design

From technology to consumer law, changes in client expectations and even social and cultural issues, almost everything has an impact upon design. Increasingly, this is reflected in web design.

In a fast paced, media driven society, the internet is as powerful as ever in delivering information, products and services to the masses. In order to keep up with the constant shifts in web, us designers need to keep our eyes peeled and ears pricked!

Recently, our design team put together a presentation outlining a few of the key trends in the development of web design and what we, as designers, will be experimenting with moving forward.

In today's post, I'll look at the history behind the current state of web design, before outlining some of the current web design trends identified in our presentation in a follow up post tomorrow. 

First some computer history

With the development of code breaking technology used in WW2, by the 1950s computers as we know them had been created. In the 60s and 70s, advances were made in point to point connections between computers, enabling data sharing and communication between machines. By the 80s, computers were connecting to each other worldwide - this was the birth of the internet. In the space of just 30 years, computers had gone from a calculative tool to a medium for communication across 1000s of miles.

The World Wide Web project

In 1991, the first ever website was published by a physicist named Tim Berners-Lee.

The webpage which would have looked something like the example on the right was the outcome of a project named 'World Wide Web' or 'WWW'.

Berners-Lee’s idea was to connect hypertext (text displayed on screen) with the Internet and personal computers. Initially, its purpose was to create a single information network to help his colleagues share and pass data to each other.

The potential of the World Wide Web was quickly realised, and developments escalated with the intention of providing a creative and interactive medium for anyone with access to a computer.

Berners-Lee’s vision was that web pages and browsers should be as flexible as possible, and thus the first ever web browser was also an editor. However, the system it was compatible with was far too advanced compared to most people’s computers. So, in order to get the www out to the masses, a ‘dumbed’ down version needed to be developed for distribution.

Much like today, compatibility issues and restrictions played a large part in the development and design of the WWW and its webpages.

Trend 1 - Imagery

Although early web pages were very not visually appealing, the fact that they were so simple to create and update was why the growth of the WWW was so rapid.

With the obvious advantages of web pages for companies in terms of advertising and communicating with potential customers, advances in how webpages could be utilised became increasingly important.

Trend 2 - Tables

Table based design allowed for a 'proper' layout with columns and headings.

The use of columns in layout sat in line with what is seen in magazines and newspapers. This was a tried and tested method of displaying information for print, so why not on screen?

However, as the technology developed, so did the reach of the www. New considerations arose and it was quickly realised that tables were not the best solution for web design in the long term. Tables have proved to be restrictive, produce slower load times, create layout issues with different screen sizes, damage SEO, create difficulties when printing and produce poor accessibility for users needing screen readers and other tactile devices. (Fig3)

Designers now needed to start considering a range of issues, including the speed of the website, different screen resolutions, accessibility and so on.

Trend 3 - Speed & CSS

As the speed of the internet increased, so did load times. Greater bandwidth allowed for larger images, jquery and other visually appealing effects and functionality, giving designers the ability to produce richer designs.

The use of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) layouts added flexibility for designers to experiment and move away from the rigid table formula. These layouts also enabled a higher level of site wide consistency in formatting, which made it easier to update compared to previous methods.

CSS can also be used to allow a web page to display differently depending on the screen size or device on which it is being viewed, including screen readers and braille/tactile devices.

What next?

So that's the past? What about the future?

Tomorrow I'll take a look at some of the current trends in web design and what this means for the future.

Written by Ally Wright