Hi everyone,

 

I've been having a bit of a back and forth with the IT team at my company recently (I work in marketing). We've been tasked with replicating our US offices new website, but said US office haven't been particularly helpful with providing the assets for the site. Both sites are built on different (bespoke) .NET CMS platforms, but will have more or less the same aesthetic.

 

My suggestion was to bring in a contract developer for a few weeks / months to replicate what the US have built in our platform. Our IT team have suggested that we simply visit the new US site and copy and paste the HTML / CSS / JS out of their site and drop it straight into ours.

 

Everything about this screams disaster waiting to happen to me, but I don't have enough specific knowledge to articulate why this would be a bad idea. Anyone got any advice that I can share with my boss? Or does this sound like something that would work?

 

Cheers,

 

Chris

 

 

By the sound of it the US site runs on their CMS system in which case, as Paul says, you can't really just copy and paste because most of it probably wouldn't work.

 

If you can't get any further with the US office helping you out then I'd say hire a designer/developer and build your own, that way you can build the site how you want it, and not necessarily how the US site is

Agree with both of the above points.

 

If it is just presentational and not going to update then you could copy and paste this but I would presume that the 'news' section of a site would be able to update as and when which would need the functionality adding in, unless the US office expect someone to keep copying and pasting the news section from the US to your site when new news items are added.

 

Possibly a bad idea but you could look info iframing the US page onto your site - this would need to be looked at from an SEO angle as canonicals and other tags would need to be implemented

i'd take it higher up and let it become a political problem for your bosses and the american bosses. then when the've bashed out some sort of agreement then you'll have something to work with or a budget to do rather than being left to kludge it together