While surfing the web today (which, as web developers, is kinda part of what we do), I happened upon a situation that could have been in the past (and will continue to be) counterproductive for the company involved until they get it fixed. In a nutshell, here’s what I saw. I went to a municipal chamber of commerce website. There was a link there that said “Click Here for our County Event Calendar.” When I clicked on the link, it took me to a “terrible-looking” website that obviously hadn’t been updated since 2011. Articles on that site were discussing this 2011 event and that 2011 event like they happened last week. The copyright date was 2010. The site was full of dead links. Those things are absolutely detrimental to a web presence. Not only are they annoying to visitors, your site automatically loses some credibility, as visitors think that you take care of business the same way you take care of your website. I called a phone number on the site and spoke with someone who told me that there was a “new site,” and gave me that address. He said there should be an “Under Construction” page there because they were working with new company that was “taking care of things.” When I got to the new site, it looked much better than the old site, but it was apparent it hadn’t been updated in quite a while to. The copyright notice was dated 2014.

    A webmaster can keep this kind of catastrophe to a minimum. Webmasters routinely check links among other things to make sure that everything is on your site is functioning properly. At Creative Web Design Unlimited, we have done extensive website “rehabs” and part of our process is to identify all links and domain names that were associated with old sites (or versions of sites), and redirect them to the proper place. That way the above situation can be eliminated.