A Temporal Pattern from
Patterns for Personal Web Sites
The Web is an atemporal realm; time is not considered. There's no way to tell a Web browser to pull up last year's version of a page. Even worse, there's no standard way for a visitor to determine if a page was written yesterday or five years ago. In Internet time, even a week can make a difference.
Therefore, indicate how fresh pages are by displaying the date of their most recent change.
Where to put freshness dates:
on each page, as part of its Standard Header and Footer
optionally, if the page is linked from the home page or Index Pages, by their links to the page
Freshness dates are one way to Reward Return Visitors, and reinforce the fact that your site is a Living Site.
A related idea is using icons (e.g., and ) to indicate recent site changes (as Yahoo! and other sites do). These icons should be removed after a fixed amount of time.
If your site combines pages that change with pages whose contents are frozen, you can put the status with the freshness date. (e.g., "Last change 3 May 2002; open to revision", or "Contents frozen 12 December 1998").
Last updated 19 June 2002
http://www.rdrop.com/~half/Creations/Writings/Web.patterns/freshness.dates.html
All contents ©2002 Mark L. Irons