Finish the darn site

In these modern ages, everyone and even their dog now has a website. Many of these take the form of a weblog much like this one, a forum, or a simple HTML page (I figure we could throw in social network profiles as well) and that does bring out a slight issue – it is making the World Wide Web look like an unfinished, lazy job.

The reason I say this is quite often that people will start a website and it would never get finished without the intent of ever finishing it. Developing websites can take ages to do as first there is deciding what to do the website about, design, coding and things along those lines but I am “moaning” at people who never maintain their website after it has been developed.

Sure some websites’ content will barely ever change and I can think of quite a few examples of which websites do not. I know it is quite harsh to define how good a company’s service is by just looking at the copyright but trust me when I say people look at copyright footers a lot. If your copyright is something like 2008 on a business website then you can be sure that some, if not most, who look at that may wonder what else is not being updated. Most websites run PHP so is it hard to use something like <?php echo date(‘Y’); ?> or heck if you are using Windows for some reason you are being forced to use ASP due to a Desert Eagle forced to your throat then you could use something like – <% Response.Write Year(now) %> so is it that hard to at least keep the footer up to date?

For a personal website I can understand the losing interest in a website but if you have lost interest, is it that hard to put up a notice saying this website is no longer actively being maintained or even see if anyone else would be interested in doing so?

So many websites a year are lost due to this and it really can be quite sad when a website just falls into decay over the years and their website slowly and slowly stops working in newer browsers due to changes in standards and just become a home for spam bots should they allow comments, replies and things like that.

I do know the pain of keeping a website online and running as quite a lot of my own time is spent on updating websites, developing websites and just doing things with websites but keep your website up to date, clean it up now such as deleting spam, do leave times and date when stuff updates and make the World Wide Web a little bit of a more tidy place.