Ask Amy: How to Update Your Browser's Cache

This month’s tip is a result of working with Adobe Certified Dreamweaver instructor Melissa Piconne. Melissa is an Adobe Certified Instructor teaching a broad range of Adobe classes including Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Illustrator, and InDesign. She is an accomplished information technology professional with extensive experience in user interface design, usability, navigation and look and feel. She has designed created both physical and digital media websites, animations, video games and print media.

Update your Browser’s Cache

When you surf the web, your browser stores pages in the form of Temporary Internet Files – or cache – so that when you re-visit websites they load faster, and may even be available off-line.

It became apparent that our website urgently needed some repair and updating, so we turned to one of our Instructors, Melissa Piccone, for help. Melissa did a great job repairing and updating the website, but when we visited the site, we didn’t immediately see the changes that she had made – so Melissa gave us this tip, which you can try:

1. Visit a website that you have visited before, for example, ours: www.summit-train.com
2. Prior to updating our site, our homepage listed Office 2003 and 2007 courses & courseware (both at the bottom and in the right sidebar of the homepage). After updating, we now also list Office 2010. Do you see it? If not, you will need to refresh your browser’s cache by using Melissa’s tip: Hold down the ALT key while clicking on your browser’s Refresh button.
3. Now do you see it? Your browser’s cache has been refreshed for our website.

We will be keeping Melissa on her toes with more changes to come, so when visiting our site, remember ALT+REFRESH!

Amy Pearson is a Senior Instructor for Summit Training, the author of the Ask Amy column that appears on Summit Training's monthly newsletter, and editor of the both the Summit Training and Connect Learning newsletters. Amy is a Microsoft Office MOS and has been providing Microsoft Office training both in the classroom and online for more than 15 years.