Why Are They All So Useless? OUSU Campaign Team Plagiarises Website

Gaffe-filled OUSU election continues as presidential candidate Jane Cahill’s website is revealed to be shamelessly copied from a design company.

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Not looking to be outdone by Nathan Akehurst’s website launch disaster, the Tab has discovered that Jane Cahill’s campaign website (jane4change.com) has been stolen almost entirely from an independent website design company: www.mixd.co.uk

The blundering website creator behind Cahill’s page, said “I put together the website on my own, the rest of Jane4Change were unaware of the technical process and trusted me to get the job done. There are number of standard ideas for websites and so I took inspiration from a variety of different ones.

“The website was put together in under a day with few resources and significant aspects of the website are clearly altered. I was trying to construct a clear website to engage the electorate without the resources that other teams have. The website cost 99p plus VAT; I couldn’t make it stunningly original.

“I am sorry to the company in question and thank them for their understanding.”

However, his ‘creation’ doesn’t just look similar, entire sections of text have been lifted almost without any changes from the website. See for yourself:

Don’t worry. It gets worse.

And if you think that’s bad, at least they actually bothered to change the colour in that one.

Stealing their life’s work? How could you?

Mixd Partner Mike Danford told The Tab that he was shocked to see that his website had been taken without “anyone getting in contact or dealing [with us].”

He went on to call Jane4Change “Completely shameless” and said that “had it been another creative agency, we would have considered [legal action].”

They didn’t even move the pictures.

Beleaguered presidential wannabe Jane Cahill said: “We couldn’t pay for software that could design a website for us so we aren’t using a particularly sophicated website and we were surprised to learn of the origins of aspects of the website.

“The person in charge of our website has apologised to the company and I think that’s important. We’re hoping this won’t distract from the important issues of this election.”

We suppose it could have been worse – imagine if they’d stolen the symbols from the page as well, not just the font, design, and theme.

Nope, that happened too.

I guess he just gave up and used the ‘fill’ option.

“Stunningly Original” might be over-selling yourself,.

At the time of writing Cahill’s website had been taken down.

Luckily Danford managed to see at least some humour in the debacle as he reflected that “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.”