How much weight and relevance does your web site traffic place on your content? And how do visitors know if what they are seeing is still up to date and accurate?
Readable content that is attractively illustrated and pleasingly presented is all well and good, but it still requires to be validated in some way for the web site visitor. How many sites do this is by adding a tiny piece of script onto the page to display the last time it was updated.
This simple line of text shows that the information on the page is being updated and monitored for accuracy, and that the site is active, not a forgotten about adjunct to the company’s offline business operations. In short, it instils confidence, demonstrates that the web site owner is serious about their web presence and gives a little bit of credit for your online efforts.
Flag up regular content updates with the following snippet of code that is normally placed at the foot of a web page. Feel free to diverge from this practice, but wherever you decide to locate the script on a page, be consistent throughout the site.
To implement, paste into the page:
This page was last modified: <script language="JavaScript">
document.write(document.lastModified);</script>
