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Site Content

The emergency dark site is designed to provide two types of content:

Static Content

Pre-prepared risk communication materials:

  • Pocket Guides, Fact Sheets, Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs), posters and other pre-developed information.
  • Contact information.
  • Templates for press releases, orders and alerts.

Dynamic Content

Pre-prepared risk communication materials:

  • Guidelines, Instructions - updated information from the CDC or State Public Health.
  • Alerts, Announcements - School closures, medical aid, emergency services.
  • Dynamic links to external sources of information (called mashups) that are automatically updated such as RSS feeds from the CDC.

Content Preparation

Pre-approved risk communication materials should be prepared and ready to use on the emergency dark site. To prepare materials:

  • Update existing internal public health materials, fact sheets, Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs).
  • Locate and add hyperlinks to guides, fact sheets and FAQs from external sources, including the CDC, WHO, NACCHO and your State Public Health Agency. Using the hyperlinks instead of downloading documents from other agencies ensures that your site will include updated information.
  • Update existing templates used to prepare press releases, alerts and notifications.

HTML Documents

  • Type frequently used documents directly into the emergency dark site PIO Workspace (see below for an explanation of the PIO Workspace). It helps to have static content ready to use, without needing to convert them from Word or Adobe Acrobat PDF files to HTML. When you type directly into the Google emergency dark site, everything is automatically rendered in HTML. Using HTML for the static content improves overall portability. You can easily cut and paste document text, as needed.

Adobe PDF Documents

  • Emergency materials and other documents with graphics and photos can be added to the emergency dark site as PDFs. It is best to post as much content as web page content (HTML) in order to minimize the download time, and makes content more easily accessible to disabled individuals.

    There may be times when it is not practical to convert all PDFs into HTML. If you must use PDFs, optimize them to the smallest file size possible, without losing resolution. If documents are scanned, they should be scanned at optimal settings for web use. However, even optimized PDF documents will be inaccessible to users with dial-up modems. Information on PDF optimizing can be found at the Adobe site, www.adobe.com/support/.

Creating a PIO Workspace

Risk communication materials can be prepared and stored for use on a separate Google Site called the PIO workspace. With a separate PIO workspace, static content can be prepared (pre-event) and easily accessed when the emergency dark site is activated.

To set up a PIO workspace site, you simply use the Public Health Emergency Dark Site Template from the Google Sites template gallery to create two separate sites. One site is to be viewed by the public and the other site is an internal site or PIO workspace.

Risk communication materials (the static content) you may need during emergency response can be entered into the internal PIO work space site before an emergency. Documents used during response can be:

  • Typed directly into the PIO workspace site. These documents are in HTML, so they can be easily cut and pasted into the emergency dark site. Only approved documents should be stored on the PIO work space.

    • Note: Whenever possible static content should be in text HTML format for performance reasons when using Word documents save them as text files first and then copy and paste them into the emergency dark site to render them in HTML properly.

  • Organized by incident type and tagged for searching. For example, brochures, fact sheets, FAQs and templates for earthquakes, pandemics, bioterrorism or other emergencies can be prepared on separate pages.

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