heisel.org

The guns of March?

Friday | February 28, 2003 | 4:50 pm  

At my paper, we’ve begun our prepa­ra­tion for a pos­si­ble war with Iraq.

We’ve talked with the pub­lisher and and pro­duc­tion folks about changes in size and orga­ni­za­tion of the paper.

I’ve been prepar­ing new page tem­plates, and at the copy desk we’ve assem­bled a war design team. City side has a war team of reporters writ­ing sto­ries already, and our goal is to get three pages drawn and edited before the bombs drop.

I imag­ine papers every­where are putting thought, and work, into any pend­ing con­flict with Iraq, but what about Web sites.

While the big wigs like CNN and the New York Times cre­ated low-​bandwith ver­sions of their sites after the traf­fic asso­ci­ated with Sept. 11, I think every news site should be prepar­ing some­thing similar.

Per­haps now is the time to pre­pare a low-​bandwith, CSS-​only (or CSS-​mostly), page design and get it ready to go in the event of hostilities.

For those online man­agers look­ing to make the big switch in the future, a pend­ing war (and spike in traf­fic) might be the per­fect “excuse” to sell to non-​tech bosses. They might not care if the site will be usable in the future, but when the words “site going down” are uttered, it might get their attention.

In addit­tion to design tem­plates, now is the time to start plan­ning online-​only con­tent that might need some lead time, like inter­ac­tive graph­ics of the region, or the weapons involved.

So what is every­one up to?

P.S. At the the Mis­sourian, we’ve got a non-​monetary pool going on the start date — my pick is March 9, what’s yours?

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