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| Dark Site? | |
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| Topic Started: Aug 12 2010, 02:05 PM (851 Views) | |
| yuan_zcen | Aug 12 2010, 02:05 PM Post #1 |
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I am studying crisis management and I came across the term dark site. I find no wikipedia entry for this and search results are not clear. Can anyone explain what a dark site is, how it relates to crisis management, and how one would use a dark site? Thank you. |
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| Alton Lagan | Aug 13 2010, 12:36 PM Post #2 |
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The concept has evolved over the years, but as I understand it in crisis communications, a dark site is a method of quickly changing an organization's website in response to a crisis. As we saw with Massey Energy Company, five days after they had lost 25 miners in a coal mine their web site was not only not acknowledging it, but still boasting about how 2009 was a record year for safety. In the past food companies were the worst offenders, often still heavily marketing a product on their website, which people had died from eating and was being recalled, or even claiming their product is, "finger licking good," after someone had found a finger in it. However, most food companies seem to have gotten better at this. The problem is during a crisis the media and public may be visiting your website in large numbers. This creates the technical problem, can your website handle this traffic? And the communication problem, what do they see when they get there? A dark site can be used to solve one or both problems. However, since the first problem is more of a IT problem, I will address the second one. During a crisis often those in charge of public relations or communications may want to change their organization's web site in a hurry. The problem is websites, especially those for large organizations have become very complex, and often they are contracted out to web designers for creating and maintaining. To implement unplanned changes on a site can take hours, maybe even days. Ideally public relations should be able make the changes as soon as they see the need. They should not have to send a support ticket to the IT department and have it acted on days later. That is where the concept of a dark site comes in. Even for a web designer, rapidly editing a site you have never seen before in the midst of a crisis can be difficult, for someone with no experience it can be impossible. Then there is the problem of making sure you got rid of everything on a large site that can embarrass you, make you look uncaring, or just stupid. And to top it off, making sure the site didn't get broken by the hectic edits. A dark site is like prepared news releases in a crisis plan, where all you have to do is fill in the blanks. Likely crises are considered. How the website should change in response to them is debated, and dark pages are created to address the potential crises. The technical work is done beforehand so when a crisis strikes a non technical person can make a few edits, click a button, and in short time your organization's home page can be expressing sympathy for the 15 workers who died, rather than boasting about your safety record. However, one of the most important things about dark sites is they are dark. They should never see the light of day unless the potential crises actually happens. The should be secured against anyone outside of those who maintain them ever finding them. This is my impression of a dark site. Perhaps other have other opinions, or even examples of where they have used it. |
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| yuan_zcen | Aug 16 2010, 05:42 PM Post #3 |
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Thanks for the explanation. A dark site sounds like it would take a lot of work and planing. Do you have any examples of the best way to technically set up such a site? |
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| WGCI | Sep 14 2010, 04:20 PM Post #4 |
Administrator
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There seem to by many opinions on how to set up a dark site, and I can only give mine. The one I see the most is to set up a second site on a different web host, and then change the domain name to the new host if needed. To me, this sounds overly complex, and it sounds like it might disrupt the operation of the current site making it nearly useless for regular business. I could see this useful if hackers had defaced your website, or your web server is located in your corporate headquarters, which is either going up in flames or the FBI is seizing your computers, but for media crises I don't think it is necessary. Myself, I think with proper design, CSS properties, and hidden directories, the affect of a dark site could be accomplished wile keeping your current website running smoothly. In designing the site, I would make sure that all ads and self serving statements were tagged in a way to identify them, then use the CSS display hidden property to make them go away if needed. Similarly, I'd use CSS properties and hidden directories to make text addressing the crisis visible. A series of server side scripts could be set up to swap the CSS files, change permissions on the directories, and make all the necessary changes. The scripts could be access from a protected web page where a non technical person could edit the messages to be displayed, and click a button that changes the website instantly. Of course, this approach raises some security concerns, and would be best implemented when designing the original website, but I think it would be flexible enough to deal rapidly with about any media crisis. |
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