A Site Last Updated in 2017

The site

A working business, twelve years old, with a full order book and a site nobody has touched since 2017.

The footer copyright reads 2017. The news section has three posts, the most recent from March of that year.

A page announces a new service as though it were forthcoming, and it has been running for four years.

Two staff members named on the team page left in 2019, and the price list has not been revised since it was written.

The inference a visitor makes

Not that the site is old. That the business may be closed.

Somebody who finds a site with a five-year-old copyright and a news section that stops has to decide whether it is worth telephoning.

A proportion of them will not, particularly if a competitor's site shows recent work.

Those people do not appear in any figure you can look at, which is why this problem persists: it produces no complaint and no visible signal.

The business in question was busy and attributed its enquiries to word of mouth, which was true and was also the only channel still functioning.

The items that date a site

• The copyright year in the footer.
• A news or blog section that stops.
• Named staff who have left.
• Prices that are no longer accurate.
• Announcements of things now years old.
• Photographs of vehicles or premises you no longer have.

The second is the most damaging, because it dates the site precisely. A visitor cannot tell how old an undated page is, and a blog with a final post in March 2017 tells them exactly.

The news section problem

Worth separating, since it is the one businesses handle worst.

A section started with enthusiasm, maintained for a few months, and abandoned, is worse than never having started one.

It creates a visible timestamp on a site that would otherwise be undated, and it does so on the page most likely to be linked from the navigation.

The options are to remove it, which takes ten minutes, or to restart it, which is a commitment.

Removing it is a perfectly respectable choice, and a site with no news section reads as a site that does not have one rather than as a site that gave up.

Where you keep it, publish something quarterly at minimum, since a gap of a year is barely better than a gap of five.

A worked example

The business spent an afternoon on it.

The copyright year was set to update automatically. The news section was removed entirely and its two useful posts were merged into service pages.

The departed staff came off the team page and the remaining people got current photographs.

The forthcoming service was rewritten as a service they offer. The price list was updated, which took the longest.

Four new photographs of recent work were added, dated.

Enquiries through the site roughly doubled over the following quarter, from a site that was structurally identical and merely no longer looked abandoned.

Dates cut both ways

A point worth making carefully, since the instinct after this is to remove every date.

Removing dates hides staleness rather than fixing it, and it removes the benefit dates provide when content is current.

A photograph captioned with a recent month is evidence that the business is working. The same photograph undated is neutral.

So the answer is to date the things that are current and to remove or update the things that are not, rather than stripping dates generally.

The exception is guidance content, where a date can make useful material look obsolete when the advice has not changed, and a last-reviewed date serves better than a published one.

Set up what maintains itself

Since the site got here through neglect rather than decision, and will again.

Make the copyright year update automatically, which is a one-line change and removes the most visible item permanently.

Avoid writing anything with a built-in expiry: new for 2022, our latest service, coming soon.

Prefer phrasing that ages well: since 2010 rather than twelve years of experience, which is wrong within a year.

Then set a single annual reminder to check the dated items, which takes half an hour and prevents another five-year drift.

What to check once a year

The list, since it is short and specific.

Staff names and photographs. Prices and lead times. Services offered and dropped. Opening hours and holiday closures. The phone number and address. Any announcement or offer. Certifications and their expiry. Photographs of premises and vehicles.

Add the same check for your business listing, your social profiles, and your email signature, which drift in exactly the same way.

Half an hour, once a year, covers all of it, and the reason it does not happen is that nobody owns it rather than that it is difficult.

The listing had drifted too

Checked at the same time, and it usually has.

The business listing showed opening hours that had changed, a photograph of a vehicle sold in 2018, and no posts or updates at all.

That matters more than the site for a local business, since a far larger number of people see the listing without ever visiting the website.

Updating hours, adding four recent photographs, and posting occasionally took twenty minutes and reached more people than the site work did.

Anybody doing this exercise should start with the listing rather than finish with it, because the audience is larger and the work is smaller.

The counter-case within the site

Not everything old was wrong.

The service pages were well written and still accurate, and rewriting them for the sake of freshness would have been effort spent for nothing.

Content does not decay simply by being old, and a good page from 2017 describing work that has not changed is a good page.

There is also a version of this anxiety where a business rewrites perfectly serviceable material annually to feel current.

Fix the things that are wrong or dated, leave the things that are right, and stop the clock from being visible.

What to change

1. Make the copyright year update itself.
2. Remove or restart the news section.
3. Take departed staff off the site.
4. Update prices and lead times.
5. Rewrite anything announced as forthcoming.
6. Add dated recent photographs.
7. Set one annual reminder.

Step two removes the precise timestamp, since an undated site merely looks unchanged while an abandoned blog tells a visitor exactly when you stopped.

The technical version of neglect is covered in a theme that has not been updated since 2018.

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.