What message does "Copyright 2017" send to visitors to your site? And what message does not updating it send to your company's employees? Maybe that the site's accuracy, freshness and attention to detail are not that important to you?
Yeah, I know -- you have too many other things to worry about.
But I've noticed that companies that ignore updating their copyright information tend to neglect other important things about their websites as well. It's like Malcolm Gladwell expounds in The Tipping Point: Little things can make a big difference.
A single sick person could start an epidemic of the flu, for example. Or, as Gladwell famously argues, a crackdown on New York City's subway graffiti could -- and did -- lead to a long-term reduction in violent crime.
As Gladwell explains in one of the book's better known passages:
The showdown on the subway between Bernie Goetz and those four youths had very little to do, in the end, with the tangled psychological pathology of Goetz, and very little as well to do with the background and poverty of the four youths who accosted him, and everything to do with the message sent by the graffiti on the walls and the disorder at the turnstiles.
What message does "Copyright 2017" send to visitors to your site? And what message does not updating it send to your company's employees? Maybe that the site's accuracy, freshness and attention to detail are not that important to you?
And if that is the message, how important should the site be to them?
Am I overstating it? Maybe a little. But just fix it, OK?
- Scott Baradell