Empire Essentials Marketing: Designing Under The Influence

A colleague of mine pointed it out that the website for the new medical web design firm Empire Essentials Marketing looked very similar to his own site, Medical Web Experts.   One might say the two are so similar you could say Empire Essentials copied the site design of MWE.  An entirely new design for anything is hard to come up with, but modern creativity consists of taking bits and pieces of influences and turning it into something original.

This isn't just influence though, this is outright design copying.  Take a look:

Empire Essentials Marketing

Medical Web Experts

Empire Essentials Marketing

Medical Web Experts

These are really too similar to call them influence or sheer coincidence.  Really, where is the ethic in that?  As a new company, you would want to make yourself stand out as unique amongst your competitors, not show the world how good you are at performing the exact same services and designing the same websites as older, more established companies.  Plus, how sad is that as a website design and marketing firm, the object of a company site is to showcase the examples of your creativity, but the site you're using to represent yourself is actually ripped off?