The Full Stack Leader

In “10 complaints the customers have about the design of corporate web sites“, Luke Manion mentions having current date information on your website. His tenth pet peeve is “Out of Date Information.”

An outdated copyright date or an expired offering calls all the information on a website into question as to its correctness.

I agree with Manion—I find it to be a big turn-off when a website doesn’t have a current date listed. It tells me that the site owner or maintainer doesn’t care about keeping the site up, or doesn’t know how to set it automatically.

While this concept may be a no-brainer for many webmasters and website owners, other owners and maintainers seem to ignore the easy fix — let the copyright date update itself.

At the very least, the outdated copyright date screams, “We don’t update our site. You can’t trust any of the content here.”

Of course, there are some exceptions like the homespun websites that are just flat HTML files with no scripting support. But come on—if you use any of the popular hosting services out there, whether it is a Windows, Linux, or Apple server environment, you probably have access to at least one of the common scripting languages such as PHP, ASP, or Coldfusion.

If you have an out-of-date copyright in your website footer, go fix it today. It will add credibility to your website and give the impression that you care about what your visitors see and read. Your visitors will be impressed at the turn of the year when your site date automatically changes. As a plus on the technical side, you will have one less thing to worry about when January 1st rolls around.

Here are some code samples for adding a dynamic date to your website page or blog template¹ (line wraps marked »). The output desired is:

Copyright 2008 My Company.

PHP

Copyright <php echo date('Y'); ?> My Company.

VBScript (ASP)

Copyright <?%= now(yyyy) %> My Company.

CFML (Coldfusion)

Copyright <cfoutput>#DateFormat(now(), "yyyy")#</cfoutput> My Company.

JSP (Java)

Copyright <%= new java.text.SimpleDateFormat("yyyy"). » format(new java.util.Date()) %> My Company.

RHTML (Ruby)

Copyright <%= "#{Date.today.year}" %>My Company.

Note: I do not guarantee that these code samples will work with your server and website setup. These snippets are here to show you how easy it can be to output a dynamic date in the most common scripting languages. Please use with caution and test thoroughly before using on a production website. ↩