The Occasional Need for the "Refresh Button"
Web sites that are updated often can suffer from a phenomenon that is based upon the way the World Wide Web operates behind the curtain.  This phenomenon is basically that when you view a web page, you may not see the page that is actually residing on the web site.  What you may be seeing is an old page that has been stored in a temporary data area on one or more web servers that are positioned between your computer and the computer that contains the web site.

This can be particularly frustrating (and certainly confusing) if you are looking for updates and not seeing them.  You think that the web site has not been updated or corrected when in fact, it may have been changed for DAYS and you simply are not being allowed to SEE the changes.

Fortunately, there is a simple way to make almost* sure that you are seeing the latest-and-greatest page at any given time.  Just locate the Refresh Button on your web browser and click on it.  This action will force your internet service provider to go all the way to the source to get the page that you are viewing*.  This can look pretty bizarre when you click on the button and see the page change or reformat itself "right under your nose."

So how do you find the Refresh Button?  This may not be so easy to answer right here because you might be using one of any number of browsers and you may have it configured in a way that is different from "normal."  However, your Refresh Button is probably represented by a small icon somewhere near the top of your browser's page.  The icon probably contains two arrows that appear to be "chasing each other's tail."  For instance, an arrow on the left is pointing left and down while on on the right is pointing right and up.

But in most cases, if you move your mouse cursor over the button, the word, Refresh, should pop up for a moment.  If this information is not good enough to help you find your Refresh Button, then use your browser's Help feature to look up "refresh."

Two words of warning about using the Refresh Button:

(1) Only the page you are viewing gets refreshed when you press the button.  So, as you go from page to page on a web site, you may need to press the Refresh Button on each page.

(2) Once you have refreshed a page, you would expect not to have to do so again until the page has been changed again. But this is not always the way it works.  You may come back to the page later the same day or a day or two later and find that the old page has been reinstated.  In this case, you'll have to refresh again.

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* This footnote was added several months after I first wrote the above description: Since then I have seen circumstances under which even the Refresh Button would not cause the latest web page information to be displayed. Sometimes it seems to take hours or days for new web page data to show up on the web no matter what you do.  The circumstances under which this seemed to be most extreme were when the updated information was purely graphic and was only slightly changed.  So, all future changes to the graphics on this site will be accompanied by changes in the text on the same page.  At least, I'll try that theory until it falls through as well.

Hope this helps.