Earlier this week I had a neighbor call me asking about getting his amateur or ham radio license. I explained the 3 levels of licenses and privileges associated with each. I then pointed him at some study resources as getting a license requires passing a test. Next he wanted to know where he could go to take a test. I did a quick Internet search only to find significantly outdated information. When I got my license over a decade ago, you could reliably count on a test being administered on the last Tuesday of each month at a local emergency operations center or EOC. COVID must have put an end to that and the latest information I could find seemed woefully out of date.
This underscored the importance of making sure dates on a website being updated regularly. You may have a website that advertises an event in the seemingly distant future. You send people to the site to provide information about the event as that saves you from having to say the same thing over and over. The event comes and goes but what happens to the website? If it is still up after the event, people get confused. It might be easiest to update the page letting everyone know about the success of the event. Then the site can continue to exist in digital perpetuity.
My preference for dates on websites is to store events in a database and populate the website from it. Then if there are no longer any future events, you have a message that says something along the lines of, "No events are currently planned." It is also fairly easy to add new events to the database and you don't have to worry about deleting old ones as the database logic should not show past events on an upcoming events page.
I continued searching for my neighbor and eventually found an upcoming exam session in March. That seems to be a long time away but it will be March in no time at all. That also gives him plenty of time to study.
No comments:
Post a Comment