Happy New Year!
New Year’s is often a time for “stock taking”, looking at what is working well for your business and what changes or improvements you can make for the year ahead. When the calendar changes to a New Year it is good to read up on new trends in SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and look over your website with a critical eye.
One thing that you shouldn’t overlook is the copyright date. You may need to update the copyright date in your site’s footer file. Open the footer.php file in your WordPress theme to edit the date. You can do this every year or you can enter the following code to automate this task and ensure that your site will always appear up-to-date.
This code will display as © 2012 Your site name as a link to the home page.
© <?php echo date('Y'); ?> <a href="<?php echo home_url( '/' ) ?>" title="<?php echo esc_attr( get_bloginfo( 'name', 'display' ) ); ?>" rel="home">
<?php bloginfo( 'name' ); ?></a>You can also add the first year of your site with a dash after the copyright symbol. Such as © 2011-2012
© 2011-<?php echo date('Y'); ?> <a href="<?php echo home_url( '/' ) ?>" title="<?php echo esc_attr( get_bloginfo( 'name', 'display' ) ); ?>" rel="home">
<?php bloginfo( 'name' ); ?></a>A keyboard shortcut to create the copyright symbol is to hold down the Alt key and using the number pad type 0, 1, 6, 9 – release the alt key.
I hope you find this tip helpful as you prepare your web site for 2012.
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Thanks for the tip. This is another way to demonstrate your expertise and longevity on the web.
I’ve written a short snippet which is an improvement over this, as it supports date ranges, so all you enter is the start date, and then it will display it as just that year, or that year to the current one if applicable
Check it out at http://www.gostomski.co.uk/snippet/better-auto-updating-copyright-date