Is Your Website Ready?

The phone rings at 3 am, but is your website ready to answer? With a little effort, you can be better prepared for breaking news, emergencies and those sudden surprises that need a swift response online. How you plan your site architecture, pick your technology and empower your team are all key factors in having a website ready for the unexpected.

Business as Unusual

There are countless types of surprises that can hit a business ranging from the trivial to the tragic. They can require swift and calculated responses to protect the business, inform customers and respond appropriately. These may include:

• A product recall that requires immediate communication with specific customers
• A small town thrust onto the national political scene overnight & inundated with media requests
• A breaking story that impacts the stock price and investor relations
• An internet rumor that hits the mainstream media and needs immediate damage control

While the PR department may be thinking about the communication plans in advance, it's usually not the first priority for a web team thinking about the site. So what can you do to help ensure that your website is ready?

Planning a Smart Site Architecture

Half the battle is just thinking about these potential communication issues before you have them. The best time for this is during early stages of the site planning and information architecture process. Key considerations include:

• Looking at the key pages on your site and leaving highly visible areas in the template for dynamic content and alerts. You won't want to be redesigning the entire pages. Too many page templates (especially homepage) are pixel-perfect layouts that leave no room for dynamic content.
• Going beyond the homepage to consider where your visitors would expect to find information (e.g. customer support, investor relations, media information, etc). You'll need to get information published in many places on your site – and more importantly in the right places.
• Making sure you are using technology like Flash selectively and in areas that won't need to be updated quickly (or externalizing the content for easy updating).
• Adding the ability to add information to your search results pages. Users will be quick to use your site search engine and some content may not be indexed immediately.
• Creating an alternative global header or footer that can have a persistent and global informational callout (e.g. CNN's red 'breaking news' header').

Dealing with the Traffic

When something urgent does come up, you can be sure that your site's traffic will increase dramatically — Most likely above and beyond anything you've had before. There are a few things to consider:

• Load test your site in advance to ensure it can handle reasonable amounts of traffic beyond your day to day demand.
• Create lightweight versions of your templates to swap in when the demand does increase. For example a text-only version of your homepage and other key pages can greatly increase your ability to handle more visitors. This was a key tactic that Virginia Tech used to scale its site during the 2007 tragedy.
• Have a partner organization or backup ISP ready in advance that you can switch to.

Thinking about Content Management

Most sites have some kind of content management tools these days to enable non technical users to update and maintain the site. Regardless of the specific technology, it's important to consider the following:

• Training multiple users on the content management system and how to update the key sections of the site. All too often there is a single person who knows how to get key updates out.
• Preparing a list of instructions in advance for an unfamiliar user who needs to jump in quickly to make changes.
• Setting up the content management system to dynamically publish the updates to multiple sections of the site at once. This can keep information consistent and also increase the efficiency of the response.
• Limiting CMS workflows that could get in the way of (or prevent) information from getting published to the site.

Working with the Entire Organization

While there are many things the web team can do to prepare, it's critical to have a well communicated plan that is understood across the entire organization. There need to be clearly defined roles within the web team and beyond. While you can't prepare for everything, a little planning upfront can go a long way to having a smart and flexible site.