This page is being continuously updated to provide the best information to the web community
With COVID-19 sweeping across the world, it is vital that your website provide the necessary information and resources for your visitors. While there will be differences in how you can approach this depending on the type of business that you have. Municipal sites have a greater responsibility to provide information to their community than a commercial or ecommerce website though these business also have a duty to provide information to their customers and site visitors.
Commercial Websites
Many commercial websites such as NorthFace, Vistaprint and others, Statement from your leadership on what your business is doing internally to help combat the coronavirus. This is typically in a FAQ format. Some standard questions include the following:
- There are varying restrictions in place throughout the world, am I able to order products and expect delivery?
- Are shipping times delayed?
- What measures are you taking to keep your team members safe?
- What are you doing to ensure the safety of your customers?
- Do you anticipate a shut down?
- Do you anticipate a disruption in your supply chain?
- How can I contact you with questions or concerns?
These are just some standard questions that you can use. Of course, these can be customized and tailored to your specific industry and type of business. The key here is to be as informative as possible. More information is better than not enough. One key thing to remeber is that these lists are not meant to be comprehensive and you must ensure that you do allow some way for your site visitors to contact you with any questions or concerns. A number of websites are also linking to resources found at the CDC. We feel that this is a good best practice to follow as it allows you to direct your site visitors to the top resource in the country about the coronavirus.
Municipal Websites
Local municipality websites will be key in this public health crisis. People in your community will be turning to you for more information as the coronavirus is shutting down entire states across the country. You need to keep your community informed and your website is your primary chanel in doing so. All updates from local government should be posted on your municipal website, preferabbly on a dedicated page of your site such as yourtown.com/coronavirus. It is also important that people are able to find this page on your site so we are recommending putting a link to the page in the high visablity sections of your website such as your navigation menu or a ribbon at the top of your website that shows across all pages.
Like the commercial sites, you need to guide your community to the available CDC resources. This can be done through simple links on the coronavirus page you develop or on your homepage. Because the federal government is deferring a great deal of the response to this crisis to the state governments, it is important to also provide a link to your state’s coronavirus resources such as Maryland’s coronavirus page. At this point in the crisis, every state should have its own version of Maryland’s coronavirus page.
Lastly, you need to provide local guidance to your community. If you need to declare a state of emergency for your municipality, it is important that the people in your community are aware and can find it easily so they know what it entails. You can include all of these statements on the coronavirus page as well as have them on your homepage as the City of Pittston does. If you are an education institution, you can tailor these guidelines for your institution. The CDC has specific guidances for institutions of higher education.
The coronavirus pandemic is a quickly evolving situation and a website allows your organization to provide the key information to your customers and community quickly and efficiently.