How to reach your audience when your website goes down

With so many publishing platforms and social networks available, there's no reason for a news organization to go dark when its website is down. But it must have a good plan in advance.

In a column for Poynter.org, Jeff Sonderman outlined:

10 steps to take before an outage:

• Decide what services you will use.
• Assign individual responsibility and authority.
• Set up the site and accounts in advance.
• Consider keeping your backup sites or accounts private.
• Customize temporary sites with your logo and design style.
• Add social sharing buttons, if needed.
• Add an analytics tracking code.
• Include a prominent notice to readers informing them of what happened to your normal site and why they have been redirected to the temporary one.
• Link to the last available cached version of your normal site via Google search.
• Train the staff.

And, four keys during the outage:

• Forward your traffic.
• Notify people through whatever channels you can.
• Repost recent news.
• Remember to cover your own outage.

Read the full column here.