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My personal website and others which I am involved with) display their current version number discreetly in the footer or some other area of the site. My question is whether this is useful information to visitors or whether its just textual "noise".
It is worth noting that the version number is the version of the software (not the data within the blog or whatever), so is irrelevant from a "how old is the content on this site" perspective.
Since only one version of the site is active at any given point in time and it is not a redistributed product, does the version number serve any purpose? I understand this is somewhat of a subjective question, but I would like to gauge opinion on this to guide future decisions regarding version numbers and their relevance.
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Not only do version numbers indicate that a product has been altered or improved on some level, they can also be used to communicate other important information.
A version number is a unique number or set of numbers assigned to a specific release of a software program, file, firmware, device driver, or even hardware.
The way most people i know do it is by increasing it on every version they plan on making available. Microsoft themselves for example use the "major, minor, build, and revision" semantic for their version numbers. Just don't change up the way you do your version numbers after deciding on one.
Reading version numbersThe leftmost number (1) is called the major version. The middle number (2) is called the minor version. The rightmost number (3) is called the revision but it may also be referred to as a "point release" or "subminor version".
It partly depends on the type of website.
For something like Stack Overflow with lots of features which affect users, I think it makes a lot of sense in conjunction with a change log. In other words, make the version number a link so people can find out about new features, policy changes etc.
For a mostly static website I don't think it's nearly as important. What used to happen doesn't affect my behaviour now because the site is really just disseminating information.
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