Website Copywrite questions

[pghtech]

Greetings:
I am building a website for my wifes home business, and there are few other businesses out there that have a well developed, well laid out website. For the few that are out there I have used them as only "inspiration" and to get the creative juices going on how to developer her website. The product is hand made and unique to the parties involved.

However, I do have some concerns. The word "copyright" is probably not the correct word since nothing of anyone website has been used partitially, or completely in creating my website. The concern comes in on two points of interest:

1) on a competitors website, if you select an individual product it brings up the page showing details of that particular product. I liked how they laid out the information of the product of the page starting with the title of the product, then a quick description, followed by the product dimensions, and finally the product price.

I used the ‘layout of data’ to layout the information of my product.

2) On the competitors home page, they have a flash image that rotates pictures of a number of their products. Again their products and ours are all handmade and unique. I liked the idea of being able to display some nice pictures of our products on the home page and wanted to adapt this same ‘rotation’ of our products but instead of using a flash file, use javascript. I mention that these are handmade products because there is not chance that our pictures could be taken from anywhere else, and each product is unique and one-of-a-kind.

One other piece of information: I liked how the competitors product pictures has been spiced up in something like photoshop and they have made their product appear to come out of the picture removing some of the background. Also how they have faded a portion of the background to a flat color so they can place some text in that area like the product title. I would also like to do the same thing, but unsure if this borders or is considered ‘plagiarism’ – even though it is my picture, and my complete artist doings in photoshop.

Any advice on my above concerns would be greatly appreciated.

[Author]

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