Updating your website’s copyright date

One of the annual website maintenance tasks for early January can be to update the copyright notice on your website(s). This is obviously not urgent and can certainly be included when your website is next updated (you do update your website regularly, don’t you!), however some eagle-eyed visitors may just be impressed to see 2009 added to your copyright notice early in the year, so for something pretty simple, I think it’s worth doing.

Now of course this can be automated with some simple scripts, codes or even manually with whatever find and replace functionality your software has – I’m not going to go into the options as each of you will likely have a different set-up, or prefer doing things in your own way. Though one simple example is to add the following php code to your footer, if you just want the current year noted (do a Google search for other methods):

Copyright © <?php echo Date(Y);?>

I like to include the date range – from the year of creation through to the present year (i.e. copyright © 2003 – 2008) – demonstrating how long the website/page has been live as well as it being current.  And to do this manually – it’s a good chance for a quick review of the page and to do any minor tweaking that may be helpful – we all need that now and again!

Of course if your site is based on WordPress, something I will be encouraging many to do if that meets their needs, then this may well be taken care of for you automatically by the theme’s code – though that you can change if you are so minded – and if you are then you don’t need me to tell you how!