It’s a brand new year: no doubt you have exciting new ideas for developing your corporate site in 2012. But have you taken care of calendar duties for the change of the year?
I spent yesterday reviewing various corporate websites, and was slightly surprised that they hadn’t all updated the copyright year in the footer. Many have, of course – but have you?
Some of the outdated dates I saw may have been due to caching; and today is still a holiday here in the UK – many people don’t go back to work until tomorrow, Tuesday 3 January. But the date can be automatically generated.
If it’s not automatically updated based on the system date on your site, ask your developers if they could sort this out for you – one less thing to think about next year!
Other things to consider:
- adding in future dates for the new calendar year in your events calendar, and moving 2011 dates to the ‘historic’ section of the calendar, if you keep historic dates
- making sure that you have a new tab—headed 2012, of course—for your news releases, RNS and any other time-specific sections, and that older material is moved out of the ‘current’ tab. Check your reports, presentations and webcasts pages too…
- some of your content, inevitably, will refer to 2011 as the current year. It’s worth developing a spreadsheet with the URLs of pages that need to be updated on a calendar basis, so that you can find them quickly in the future. If you don’t have one yet, then likely pages to check quickly are landing pages across the site, and your strategy pages, including your CSR strategy page if that’s separate.
- check the history/timeline page too. That might need to be updated…
- do you have any text in the rotators on your landing pages or home page, that refers to 2011 as ‘this year’?
- and while you’re having a tidy-up, are there job postings on-site that should be cleared out?
If you’re running a corporate blog, you may want to check that your archive page is working well, and think about your editorial calendar for 2012, making a note of any special company events that are coming up that could be or should be covered in the blog.
And here’s something that has caught me out in the past: if your blog software automatically creates new subdirectories for uploads, ensure that you have access to any new 2012 subdirectories. If your systems administrators keep tight control of access rights, you may find that they haven’t yet given you permission to update those subdirectories. It’s quickly sorted out, of course, but I expect you want to get a flying start on 2012.
What have I missed? Are there any New Year jobs that need doing on your corporate website that I haven’t mentioned here?
Lucy is Editor at Corporate Eye
