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Check your footer…

March 13th, 2008 Posted in Business Strategy

Want to make a 10 second fix to your community site that will visibly improve perception for new users? It won’t even require a designer and might not require a developer. And far too many of your competitors and colleagues haven’t done it. It’s simple, really.

Update your footer’s copyright year.

That’s right, it’s 2008, folks. When new site visitors come to the site and see that your footer still says 2004, it helps support the belief that they are staring at a dead community. You laugh, but you’d be surprised how many webmasters and site owners over look this one.

If you want to get really tricky, drop a bit of code into your footer that sets the copyright date to today’s date, and you never have to touch it again.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, March 13th, 2008 at 9:46 am and is filed under Business Strategy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
  • http://170spoons.com Rob Williams

    Great idea! I don't have a copyright date in the footer in my blog though. I guess mostly because I like for each post to have the full date. What do you think about that?

  • http://170spoons.com Rob Williams

    Great idea! I don’t have a copyright date in the footer in my blog though. I guess mostly because I like for each post to have the full date. What do you think about that?

  • http://www.salberg.org Lawrence Salberg

    @Rob: I think it means you don't value your content and want to protect it. Should someone copy it and decide to use it, it will only make your case that much more difficult to win in court later. You don't need a copyright in every post – just the footer of your website (on every page). See Jake's blog (or mine and thousands of others) for an example.

    @Jake: Only thing I'd add is that, technically, it's better to leave the original copyright year in place and add the new year as a range of dates. As you do on your blog correctly. @2003-2008 Jake McKee. All Rights Reserved. Or it can be shortened to @2003-08, etc.

  • http://www.salberg.org Lawrence Salberg

    @Rob: I think it means you don’t value your content and want to protect it. Should someone copy it and decide to use it, it will only make your case that much more difficult to win in court later. You don’t need a copyright in every post – just the footer of your website (on every page). See Jake’s blog (or mine and thousands of others) for an example.

    @Jake: Only thing I’d add is that, technically, it’s better to leave the original copyright year in place and add the new year as a range of dates. As you do on your blog correctly. @2003-2008 Jake McKee. All Rights Reserved. Or it can be shortened to @2003-08, etc.