Sometimes even the big guys fail to update their sites

As the eight or ten of you who read this know, I used to be the online editor at a small daily newspaper north of Albany. Part of my duty was keeping the website, especially the homepage, updated and fresh. Almost every morning, before I did anything else, I was up to make sure the expected updates had been made overnight and that the site didn't look the same as the night before. Most times everything was hunky-dory, sometimes it wasn't.

It's good to know that even the giant, multi-national corporations have the same problems from time to time. I submit this screen grab from NBC.com, taken at 10:51 EST this morning as I sipped my coffee at work. Note that the homepage is still displaying Sunday night's NFL game between the Giants and Eagles as happening "tonight."

Actually, I wish it WAS still Sunday night. Maybe the outcome of this game would be more satisfying.

The fact that this fairly prominent error was still live 11 hours after the game ended suggests that someone hadn't looked at the site carefully since then, even in the regular working hours of a Monday morning. Maybe they only have one web guy/gal and he/she is out for an extended Thanksgiving break; maybe their (no doubt) overworked web staff is busy with a bigger project. Either way, I think this perfectly illustrates the point that behind every website there is a person, or a group of people, responsible for its upkeep (and countless others who aren't looking at the site to notify them of errors).

Sometimes I wonder how often often we, as people feeding at the trough of information, forget that. In my former role, I was constantly anxious about the public perception of the brand if the website wasn't fresh and updated. In turn, I elevated that responsibility to sacred status in my day-to-day job description. However, I also balanced my worries against anecdotal or first-hand experience with other sites that allowed similar small, or even more egregious, errors. I also factored in my response, as a user of those sites, to such mistakes. Which is much like my reaction to this NBC example: "Hmm. Looks like someone forgot to update the homepage. Oh well."

I think my paranoia was justified to an extent (of course it's best-practice to keep your site timely), but as a player at a (by comparison) small potatoes operation, there's comfort to be found when the big names suffer the same sort of mistakes..