No, I’m not venturing into the realm of age discrimination with this post. I’m talking about the content that’s made available to customers and vistors to your employer’s Web site. What got me thinking about this was a blog post that I recently read titled “Out of Date Content Should Be Deleted.”

While the post focuses on news stories on a Web site, the same thinking can be applied to documentation and technical collateral. I’ve seen corporate Web sites that contain docs for versions of applications that are several years old. But how much of that information is still relevant, and should it still be made publicly available?

My thought is no. I tend to advise the companies that I’m working with to only make the documentation for the last two releases of a product available on their Web sites. From what I’ve seen, the larger number of customers will be using or have upgraded to one of those versions when the latest edition of an application is released.

Older documentation should be archived, but in an easy-to-find location in case a customer needs it. All you have to do is dig into the archive and send it off.

What are your thoughts on this? Feel free to leave a comment.

Related posts:

1. If it’s not them, then it’s probably you
2. Use cases: an essential part of any tech comm project
3. Musings on user-generated documentation