As if Mr Brown didn’t have enough to deal with at the moment it appears that the shiny new website he paid £100,000 for might have been based on a free Wordpress theme.
What’s more the designer of the theme is alleging that Number 10 (or the agency that built the site) has removed the footer attribution and is therefore in breach of copyright.
Of course there are two sides to every story and copyright of Wordpress themes is a somewhat grey area so it’s interesting that the agency has taken time to respond to the issue on their blog.
Downing Street has issued a statement but judging by the number of blogs covering the story it isn’t going to die down that easily.
Our supplier is certain that there is no such issue concerning the new website. Again, thanks for feedback and please keep it coming.
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3. Patrick also runs Blogstorm.You can get our blog posts delivered for free by email every day - simply add your email address to the box below or alternatively grab the RSS feed.
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Haha. How amusing.
£100,000 for a Wordpress theme?!!!!! I’m obviously in the wrong business!
There’s no need to go too far to find out that copywriting was breached.
Just take a look at the theme stylesheet.
Hm, it looks familiar to me.
http://antbag.com/networker-theme-for-wordpress/ the theme it was based upon.. you can see it in the style sheet referencing – it makes sense to use word press as it’s a simple to use cms.. but it wouldn’t of done any harm admitting it, Gordon Brown could of even used it as positive spin.. Number Ten Embraces open source publishing platform.. etc etc.
Alias £100k for it well that was just some web company “having a laugh”.. u will be surprised how many sites use wordpress as a base and remove the copyright.. bad practice but it seems to pay many people bills.
I was expecting something more flashy for 100k.
£100,000 of tax payers money for a website! You can get an idea of how this guy has brought the economy to its knees!
no joke! i was expecting something much much bigger and much different…
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