Keep It Fresh

Problems

Websites lose value with time. The perceived value of information is decreased if it is surrounded by items like "Coming in Fall, 1996!" in 2002, even if the essential information is still valid.

Context

The site is either serving as a marketing or educational tool, and the users' perception of the value of the information is critical to judging the site's success or failure. With a marketing site, generating return visits is critical to keep the brand's identity in the user's mind.

Solution

Maintain and update the site. Maintenance means avoiding LinkRot and keeping the server running. Updating the site means adding new content and correcting problems with old content.

New content should be highlighted, either by having a "clearing house" page like RecentChanges, or by putting the new material at the head and moving old material "off the end" of the page.

If the site isn't generated by the users (like Wiki), new material should be published on a schedule. Most sites can probably get by with daily or even weekly updates, but the important point is to do it regularly in order to reassure users that the site is still relevant.

Resultant Context

Users are reassured that the information in the site is up to date and has value. Marketing sites have more hits, which may be the primary measure of the site's success.

Known Uses

WikiWikiWeb and the RecentChanges page, http://freshmeat.net, http://www.yahoo.com, any news site.

I disagree. Keeping it updated is expensive, time consuming and rarely practical for any business not centred on the web. Web publishing is a violation of OnceAndOnlyOnce because you generally have to manually recopy/reformat information already present in the organization in one form or another. Sometimes the information exists only in people's heads and then it becomes really hard to create a website. Personal websites suffer moreso because there is low ReturnOnInvestment to encourage updates.

Generally, however, the failure of websites stems from the failure of HTML; writing HTML is like writing assembly. It's static, very low-level, extremely expensive. Instead, generate your page from the original data source on the fly or constantly post output of an HTML "compiler" (aka generator).

This technique reduces data drift, allows massive site-wide changes to occur quickly and removes the stagnant "new" link phenomenon (you can timestamp all changes and flag the newness when the page is generated). The drawback is that this is slower, much like intepreted languages are slower than native machine code. Tradeoffs, tradeoffs. -- SunirShah

I'm not sure I understand. You start by saying "I disagree", then propose using a tool to KeepItFresh. There are, in fact, quite a few tools like you describe; they generally suffer from poor usability, poor flexibility, and too steep a learning curve. I absolutely agree that a DynamicSite is the way to go, but few companies want to put the time and money into it -- "repurposing" the brochure is about as far as most companies are willing to go. [See also PopWebsiteDesigners]

[I ignored the bit about "only companies focused on the web" because, IMHO, if you're not focused on the web, you're focused on being an also-ran.]

-- RobCrawford

I disagreed with the proposed solution and then proposed a replacement. Hope that clears things up. --ss

You guys are talking at cross purposes here. Keeping a web site fresh is necessary to having return visitors. If you aren't interested in having visitors return to your site then don't bother updating it or maintaining it. (Look up the history on www.glock.com if you want to know how bad it can get.) It is not necessary to learn HTML or some complex web design tool to maintain content if the site is designed to be updated by the business owner. Yes, that does require up front design and site building considerations. Yes, it is more expensive. It does not require complex, expensive, difficult-to-learn content management systems. A little bit of PHP on the server can keep a site up to date for a long time. This is exactly what I intend to do with my church's site. Have the weekly announcements and such stuff entered by the church secretary and then automatically published on the site. -- MartySchrader