The Footer Still Says Copyright 2013

A year that stopped

This week, plenty of small business websites still end with a footer that says copyright 2013. Some say 2011, or whatever year the site went live.

Further up the page there is often more. A badge says new for 2014. The events page lists a workshop from last spring. A banner offers a discount that ended in November.

Each was true once. Nobody went back to change it.

A visitor who notices is not thinking about copyright. They are wondering whether anyone still runs the business.

What a stranger reads into a date

Someone finding your business for the first time has very little to judge it by. They cannot see your premises or meet your staff, so they read small signs on the page.

A date is one of the few things they can check for themselves, and a date that has passed is easy to spot.

And once one detail looks neglected, the doubt spreads. It reaches the prices, the opening hours and the promise to reply within a day, and rather than phone to check, many people simply go back to the search results.

Where the dates hide

• The footer year, typed once when the site was built.
• Badges and banners announcing something new for a year now gone.
• Class, event and workshop dates from last season.
• Offers with an end date that has come and gone.
• Price lists and forms with a year in the title or file name.
• The newest blog or news post, and the date beside it.
• Feeds and widgets showing a last post from long ago.

The fifth is the one owners miss, because nobody opens their own downloads. A registration form named for 2014, or a sheet of last year's rates, suggests the prices have changed since.

Let the footer year look after itself

On most websites the footer is one template shared by every page. Whoever maintains the site can make it print the current year from the server's clock, a one-line change that never needs touching again.

Older sites built as separate HTML pages have the footer copied into each one. A shared footer file or a small script fixes that at the next round of edits.

Some businesses show a range instead, from the year they started to the current one, with the second part automatic. Others drop the year altogether; in Canada copyright does not depend on the notice, so nothing is lost.

Either way, the footer is the easy part. The rest of the page needs a person.

Write so the text stays true

Much of what dates a site is wording rather than dates. Words like new, latest and coming soon all have a shelf life, and nobody tracks it.

Years in business is the classic case. Fifteen years of experience was true when it was written; established in 2001 stays true for good.

Describe recurring things in lasting terms: what the class is, who it suits, how often it runs. Keep the actual dates in one place on the page, where changing them is obvious.

Events and offers need an end

Anything with a date should go up with a removal date of its own, written in a calendar on the day it is added, with a name beside it.

Event plugins can hide past dates automatically, and many shop systems can end a sale on a set day. Where those exist, use them; the calendar entry then becomes the backup.

Expired offers deserve the most care. A discount still showing after it ended invites customers to ask for it, and can amount to advertising a price you no longer give.

A worked example

A running coach runs beginner clinics and half-marathon groups from a community centre in a suburb, and coaches a few runners one to one.

Her website was built in 2013. By last autumn the footer still said so, the home page carried a badge reading new for 2014: trail running group, and the clinics page described the spring 2015 session as open for registration.

The race calendar ended in October 2014. The registration form was a PDF with 2014 in its name.

Most of her runners came back season after season or arrived by word of mouth, so she rarely looked at the site. Then a newcomer emailed to ask whether she was still coaching, since the website suggested she had stopped.

The fix took a morning. The footer year became automatic, the badge went, and the clinics page now describes each clinic in lasting terms, with one box giving the next start date.

The race calendar was removed, and a reminder to update the box sits in her calendar for the week each clinic ends.

Search for the years

Reading every page is slow, and owners skim past what they wrote themselves. Searching is quicker.

Use the site's own search, if it has one, for 2013, 2014 and 2015.

Google can do the same across the whole site. A search for site:yourdomain.ca 2014, with your own address, lists old PDFs and pages that nothing links to any more.

Each result is either still true, needs a new date, or should come down.

Make the check someone's job

Owners rarely spot any of this. They know their own prices and opening times by heart, and almost nobody scrolls down to their own footer.

Where a developer or agency looks after the site, add a dated-content check to their work each season. It takes them minutes, because they know where everything lives.

The counter-case

Some dates are meant to stay. A blog post, a project write-up or a history page is honest with its date on it, and nobody reads an old article as neglect if it is clearly an archive.

And a stale footer on a site that is otherwise current costs little. It is the pile-up of small old dates that makes a site look abandoned.

The rule is about what is presented as current. Make the year automatic, and give every dated item on the site an end date of its own.

Before the end of January

1. Read the footer on two or three pages.
2. Make the year automatic, or show a range.
3. Search the site for 2013, 2014 and 2015.
4. Remove expired offers and badges that say new.
5. Move class and event dates into one box.
6. Swap years of experience for the year you started.
7. Put removal dates in the calendar.

Step three is the one that finds what reading never will. The forgotten price sheet and the page nothing links to are invisible from the menu, and a search turns them up in minutes.

The same January habit applies to the phone and the inbox, as covered in the enquiries your business lost last year.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.