Local governments face many of the same resource limitations that public media outlets do — namely too few web developers and IT infrastructures unable to handle large surges in traffic. The government of Santa Clara County, home to California’s Silicon Valley, ran into trouble with its website when H1N1 first emerged. The County’s website was overwhelmed by visitors searching for swine flu information and it quickly collapsed under the strain. The Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship Program at Stanford University (the school is located in the County) offered its assistance and helped the County publish its H1N1 pages on the Google Sites platform. Google Sites is basically a hosted wiki that allows users to build websites without any html or coding experience. And with Google’s redundant server infrastructure, sites hosted on the platform should be able to handle any large spikes in traffic.

The new Santa Clara County presence on Google Sites was a stable, straightforward warehouse of H1N1 information, but the default templates provided by Google made it somewhat difficult to navigate. Santa Clara officials and the Stanford team saw a need to create a custom template to meet the needs of communicating large amounts of information and improve the user experience.

The Stanford team contacted Bolt|Peters, a San Francisco design firm, to help construct custom templates to serve the emergency response needs of local governments like Santa Clara County. The results are two Google Sites templates — one for public health scenarios and another for more general emergency needs. You can read about the details and approach that went into the planning of these templates on the Bolt|Peters website.

These templates have been made available for anyone to use on Google Sites. They could be a good option for public media outlets that need to get a site up fast when a crisis hits. It took me less than 5 minutes to launch this test site and place the FluPortal logo in the header. The templates provide a visual layout and page structure as well as plenty of pre-populated content and links that local stations can edit and customize as they see fit.

It must be said that Google Sites has a number of limitations (to name a few: limited html control and no CSS editing), but I am impressed with these emergency templates and by the ability to get a website up and running in a matter of minutes. I’m not entirely convinced that Google Sites can serve as a crisis response platform for public media at large, but the work by Bolt|Peters and the Stanford SIE team highlights important elements of crisis communication and preparedness that we should all be thinking about.