This is deeply disturbing-- a close friend's career may be going in the tank because of a browser technicality!

This gentleman hired someone to design his company's website, and unknown to him the designer plagiarized another website. The rightful owner found out and called my friend, who of course agreed to change it. He DID change it.

But when the owner went to my friend's completely redone site, he found that the front page had changed, but when clicking on internal links, the same plagiarized content appeared! He was extremely irate at being apparently lied to, and is threatening legal action.

***

I know that browsers have default cache settings that can sometimes load old content when live content is unavailable or loading slowly. Is it possible that's what happened here? The angry person simply failed to clear his cache, creating the misconception?

I'm appealing in good faith to the altruism of this knowledgeable community. ANY insight at all is much appreciated.

Thank you.

Did he change the design layout of ALL the web pages? Apparently he doesn't know HTML well, what is the site URL so I can exam further?

Of course he did. The entire site was redone. This is not an HTML expert we're talking about.

Again, I would need to see a URL to examine the site.

So, have your friend explain to this irate person that until he/she refreshes their browser, using the browser button or by hitting F5, the changes are NOT coming from the server but from this person's hard drive. People simply do NOT understand what the browser cache is or what it does. You have to tell them, give them specific step-by-step instructions to clear it. This person will have to hit f5 on EVERY page previously visited until the changes appear.