OH NO. SOMEONE COPIED YOU.

How disappointing.

They’ve taken your idea.

The colours look suspiciously familiar.

The wording sounds like yours.

Maybe they’ve even managed to recreate enough of your website that
your stomach drops the moment you see it.

Grab the pitchfork.

Actually—

don’t.

Hear me out first.

Because I’ve been copied too.

And yes, I cried about it.

My first business,

Cooper Delivered
,
sells shampoo bars.

Shampoo bars are particularly easy products to make look similar online.
They’re bars. They’re photographed. They’re described. They’re sold.

But this wasn’t simply another business selling something similar.

I found another website using wording that was so familiar that,
for a moment, I genuinely thought I was reading my own website.

Then I realised I wasn’t.

There were little changes.

I’m a hairdresser, so that became something else.

A word changed here.

A sentence adjusted there.

But I knew where it came from because
I had written the bloody thing.

Did they potentially make sales from something I’d spent time creating?

Probably.

Was I happy?

Absolutely not.

But eventually I had to ask myself a much more uncomfortable question.

IF I REMOVED YOUR LOGO, WOULD I KNOW THIS WEBSITE BELONGED TO YOU?

Remove your logo.

Remove your business name.

Remove the product photography.

Now look at what’s left.

Would I still know it was you?

That’s the question that changed the way I started thinking about websites.

Because copying words is easy.

Colours are easy.

Products can look similar.

Templates can certainly be replicated.

But copying an entire experience
becomes considerably harder.

And that’s when I stopped thinking:

How do I stop somebody copying my website?

And started thinking:

How do I make my website so deeply connected to my business
that copying it wouldn’t make sense for anybody else?

That became much more interesting.

A WEBSITE DOESN’T HAVE TO BE A DIGITAL PIECE OF PAPER

Think about walking into a physical shop.

The door opens.

Maybe there’s music playing.

Something catches your eye.

Someone greets you.

Products are arranged deliberately.

There’s texture. Lighting. Movement. Sound. Personality.

You’re experiencing the business before you’ve bought anything.

Then we invented websites.

And somehow decided:

Rectangle.

Image.

Heading.

Paragraph.

Button.

Three cards.

Another rectangle.

Newsletter.

Footer.

Goodnight.

Obviously I’m exaggerating.

A little.

Templates serve a purpose. They make websites accessible to businesses
that don’t have enormous development budgets.

They provide structure. They can be fast, functional and perfectly appropriate.

Templates aren’t the enemy. Sameness is.

Because we now have extraordinary digital technology available to us.

Animation. Responsive interaction. Scroll behaviour. Layering.
Micro-interactions. Video. Dynamic content. 3D environments. AI.

And yet enormous parts of the internet still behave like we’re laying out a newspaper.

Why?

I WANTED MY SHAMPOO WEBSITE TO FEEL LIKE MY SHAMPOO BUSINESS

This is where

Cooper Delivered

became my experiment.

I wasn’t trying to build the world’s greatest website.

I’m still not.

I wasn’t trained as a web developer.

I’m a hairdresser with businesses, rural land and a slightly unreasonable
number of ideas.

But I knew how I wanted Cooper Delivered to feel.

Green. Forest. Water. Ritual. Earth. A little magic.

And definitely not clinical e-commerce.

So I started asking:

What if the website behaved like the business?

Move across parts of the website and the environment changes.

The forest appears.

Products don’t simply sit politely inside boxes.

Ingredients can emerge around them.

Elements move.

There are little moments inspired by real things.

Remember being a kid with a wet bar of soap?

You’d squeeze it between your hands and—

POP.

There it goes.

That ridiculous little physical moment can become inspiration for digital movement.

That’s the bit I love.

Not animation because animation looks cool.

Movement because the movement means something.

My love of green belongs there.

The terracotta belongs there.

The forest belongs there.

The ritual belongs there.

The slightly magical,
where-the-hell-is-my-Hogwarts-letter
part of my personality belongs there too.

Because it’s my business.

If somebody copied all of that for an accounting firm tomorrow,
we’d have some questions.

And that’s precisely the point.

> Explore the Cooper Delivered website

THEN CAME NANA’S QUEST

Nana’s Quest

presented a completely different problem.

It’s a marketplace.

Other people sell their handmade products there.

So why should their work be placed inside another plain marketplace?

I wanted people to feel like they’d arrived somewhere.

So Nana greets you.

You’ve entered her home.

Then you’re invited further into her world.

And when it came to discovering handmade products, I thought about where
we traditionally discover things like that.

Markets.

Sunday wandering.

Stalls.

Unexpected finds.

Things made by actual human hands.

So I started building that feeling digitally.

Images became stalls.

Sections became places.

Navigation became discovery.

The website stopped being merely:

Here is Product A.
Here is Product B.
Add to cart.

It started becoming somewhere you could wander.

Is it perfect?

No.

It probably never will be.

But it belongs to Nana’s Quest.

That’s more important to me.

> Wander through Nana’s Quest

AND NOW YOU’RE STANDING INSIDE THE THIRD EXPERIMENT

Cooper Delivered Digital

was born from the same idea.

Except this business isn’t a forest.

And it isn’t Nana’s house.

It’s technology.

Signals.

Circuits.

Experiments.

Code.

Things being built because something was missing.

So its digital environment should feel different again.

That’s the entire bloody point.

Three businesses.

Three identities.

Three websites that shouldn’t be interchangeable.

> Enter Cooper Delivered Digital

MAYBE INTERACTIVE WEBSITE DESIGN ISN’T ABOUT MAKING THINGS MOVE

This distinction matters.

Because I don’t want the next generation of websites to become:

EVERYTHING MOVES!

That would be equally horrible.

Your cursor doesn’t need to trigger seventeen explosions before
someone can find your phone number.

Animation that gets between the customer and what they’re trying
to accomplish isn’t clever.

It’s friction.

Accessibility matters.

Performance matters.

Mobile matters.

Navigation matters.

Conversion matters.

The customer still needs to understand what the hell you sell.

So perhaps interactive website design is actually the wrong
thing to obsess over.

Maybe the better question is:

What should this website do because of who this business is?

A ceramic artist might have products emerge as though they’re being
pulled from clay.

A florist might let seasons subtly transform the environment.

A bookshop might allow visitors to move through shelves rather than
a conventional product grid.

A mechanic probably doesn’t need enchanted flowers exploding out
of the navigation.

Although now I want to build that.

The interaction needs a reason.

SO I’M STARTING AN INVESTIGATION

This is where things could get interesting.

I want to start looking at real websites.

Not to humiliate businesses.

Not to declare myself the Supreme Leader of Website Design.

And certainly not to tell professional developers that the hairdresser
from rural Western Australia has arrived to save them.

😂

I want to investigate something much simpler.

What is interesting about this business that hasn’t made it onto
its website yet?

I’ll look at a business.

Its story.

Its products.

Its personality.

Its customers.

Then I’ll ask:

What could this website become if we stopped treating the template
as the finish line?

Maybe I’ll sketch interactions.

Maybe I’ll propose movement.

Maybe I’ll completely reimagine a section.

Maybe the business owner will see it and think:

That’s bloody brilliant.

Maybe they’ll grab the aforementioned pitchfork.

Either outcome makes for an interesting experiment.

THE MOVING NEWSPAPER HAS FINALLY ARRIVED

That’s what fascinates me about where the web is heading.

For decades, websites have essentially been increasingly sophisticated
digital pages.

But they don’t have to remain pages.

They can become environments.

Interfaces.

Tools.

Stories.

Shops.

Games.

Worlds.

Experiences.

Sometimes all at once.

AI is accelerating what individual people can create.

Technology that previously required enormous development teams is
becoming increasingly accessible.

Which means the question is changing.

It isn’t simply:

Can we build this?

Increasingly, the answer is yes.

The better question is:

What should we build?

And if your answer is exactly the same thing as the business beside you—

perhaps that’s where the investigation should begin.

DON’T WORRY ABOUT WHO COPIED YOU

Make yourself harder to copy.

Not through secrecy.

Not through paranoia.

Not by spending your life watching competitors.

Build more of you into the thing.

Your history.

Your weirdness.

Your customers.

Your rituals.

Your humour.

Your reason for existing.

Your physical world.

Your ideas.

Your imagination.

Because somebody can copy a sentence.

They can copy a colour.

They can copy a layout.

They can probably even copy an interaction.

But once all those decisions are connected to a business they
don’t actually own—

the copy starts looking rather silly.

So no. I don’t think the future of web design is simply more animation.

I think it’s something much better.

The death of the website that could belong to anybody.

And the birth of the one that could only belong to you.

> investigation.open();