Web design & hosting forum: How not to maintain a website.

There's a respected company PC Tools (daughter of Symantec, that - as part of its website - has a "guides" section. An example is the 'Security guide for windows' http://www.pctools.com/guides/security/

Really unbelievably it says "The Windows® Security Guide provides information and resources to secure the Windows® operating system and networks with details about the latest vulnerabilities and fixes, articles and technical support. Get started by exploring the categorized vulnerabilites below:" (emphasis by me). Looks good, doesn't it. But the latest security thread mentioned is from October 3, 2003 about a patch for IE5.0, 5.5 and 6.0. Which is REALLY very old.

The interesting thing is that the page looks quite current if you compare it with their home page http://www.pctools.com. Same header, same footer, including copyright until 2012. But there's one very small difference. In the tabs in the header on the security page is a tab for "Guides" which they left out from their home page. So the only way to find this very outdated information is a search engine or a link into it from somewhere else.

Obviously, someone decided to stop with those guides back in 2003 (other guides, easy to find from the link above, are about autoexec.bat and config.sys in MS-DOS in Windows 3.1). But they either forgot about it or nobody had the courage to remove those outdated pages from their site. Well, finally (I don't know when) they did remove the 'guides' tab from their home page. Some minor manager might have had the authority to do that and it's better than doing nothing.

But it's clearly not enough to prevent the company being the laugh of the month in website maintenance for me. It's really absurd: a security company like Symanted claiming that the latest threads are from 2003, isn't it?

Kees