Thinking about publishing an online magazine or newspaper? Starting a new way to gather and report news in a region? Then you’re probably considering the elements of your site. It’ll have a masthead (aka header), menus, headline, stories…and the publication date. Right?

Sort of.

This photo of a USA Today was taken on Thursday, September 24, 2009 – but the newspaper is dated Monday, September 21, 2009. Thanks to that date I know better than to buy this paper. The date isn’t there to tell me what day it is (though I admit that I’ve used a newspaper to figure out the date), it is there to tell me what day that document was published.

But for some reason, folks working on the web decided that showing today’s date (rather than the publication date) was the ideal way to indicate fresh content:

Displaying the day’s date on a website doesn’t guarantee the content is fresh. All it means is that you’ve got a bit of PHP or Javascript whiling away the time.

Are your users going to your site to see what day it is? No. Unless you’ve developed a dashboard (see iGoogle and My Yahoo) they’re going to your site to get the freshest information, whether its about User Experience Design or Hollywood gossip. If your front page isn’t updated on a daily basis, consider including the content’s publication date (or time) next to the headline:

What are some other ways designers can accurately display the publication date for content? Does it mean putting the date next to every article on a page or just stopping the over-reliance on javascript date snippets?

In art classes one of my professors would joke:

If you can’t make it good, make it big and make it red.

He was referring to sculpture, but these page numbers from Business Week are all three: good, big and read red. I’ve never had such an easy time finding an article. Take a look at that page above! You’re looking at an iPhone photo and the page number is readable.

P.S. While looking for information on page numbers I learned that in book-making the left-page in a spread is called the verso and the right is the recto. And recto-verso refers to two-sided text.

P.P.S. I answer the question ‘What good are economists anyways?’ with the answer ‘Washing dishes.’ because my husband is both an economist and an excellent dish washer.