Kevin Potts
"Web Design and Marketing Solutions for Business Websites"
A proper copyright notice includes three things. The first is the actual word or symbol (?©)
for copyright. Although only one is necessary, some sites include both, which can be beneficial
for international sites since the letter C within a circle is universally recognized as
the copyright symbol. The best way to represent this HTML entity on a web page is ©
or ©. (Simply copying the ?© symbol into an HTML page will invalidate the HTML??”the
character needs to be properly encoded.)
The second thing that needs to be included is the date of the copyright. This should always
be the current year if the copyright is still valid. Many companies fail to update this, and
innumerable sites exist with an embarrassingly outdated year. To illustrate, in the survey of
homepages detailed in Chapter 5, 80.5 percent of the businesses included a proper copyright
notice on their homepage, but of these, nearly 40 percent were out of date, some of
them three or more years behind.
The best way to keep a copyright year current is to use a script that dynamically calls the
information. This way it never needs to be manually updated. For instance, if running PHP
on a site, the script would be simple:
Copyright Sigma Investing
The code is equally simple in ASP, and can also be done in JavaScript with something like
this: