The date formats on website, does it matter?

Beginners guide

Not many articles discuss about the representation of date. After all, a date is a date and how on earth will it be different across the globe. However, you will be surprised to know that the dates are formatted differently around the world, and if you are not careful in writing them on your website then your web pages might as well confuse the readers and cause a serious misunderstanding.

The Diversity of Numeric Date Formats

Let’s take 10.4.2009 for example. Depending upon your location it can either mean October 4, 2009 or 10 April 2009. If you have ever noticed the date formatting options in your operating system be it Windows, Mac OS X, Linux or any other OS, where dates can be formatted MM/DD/YY, DD/MM/YY or even YYY/MM/DD. Did I confuse you? You will know it in a bit.

If you are publishing a website then the numeric date formats will become ambiguous. Websites aren’t like your local newspaper. When you publish a site or a blog, you have an international audience; you are speaking to the world indirectly. The visitors coming to your site are accustomed to their local date formats and when they encounter your site, they will instinctively read your dates in the format of the dates they are used to perceive. To avoid any such misunderstanding it is always best to write the dates in a way that will be understood correctly, no matter where the visitor who is viewing your site comes from.

How to Write Understandable Dates

The simplest and easiest way to write dates that can be understood in any part of the world is to spell out the month. If we take the above mentioned example for instance then you can simply say October 4, 2009 or 4 October 2009 instead of 10.4.2009 or 4.10.2009. When you spell out the month obviously there are no chances of any confusion. It doesn’t matter whether you mention the date before the month or after the month. Use whichever arrangement you are most familiar within your country. The minute the month is spelled out there are no chances of the date getting misjudged.

Some owners of the sites don’t want to spell out the month as they fear that it makes their dates understandable to the people who can read the language the date is written in. this is a baseless argument. No matter how you look at it the site will be written in that particular language and what different will the month be from the rest of the web page if it is spelled out in a particular language. After all it follows the same language as you have it on your website. If a visitor can read the rest of the web page in the language then they can also read the date. Otherwise, they aren’t even going to look at your date anyway.

If you still insist on having a numeric date, then the numeric date format which yields least doubt is the YYYYMMDD format. The date which is read as 20091004 or 2009-10-04 will perhaps be interpreted as 4 October 2009 by most of the people. But there are few perverse people who insist that date to be 20 September 1004, but unless you are developing a site describing historical events. It’s a personal feeling that the date like 4 October 2009 or October 4 2009 is easily readable and faster to visually scan the terms than a string of numbers.

Usability and Professionalism

Although the date constitutes only a miniscule part of the web design, it is one of those little things which will help you in increasing the usability and professionalism of your site. After all, it doesn’t even require you to put any efforts in it.