Create static fec.gov homepage when website is down

[patphongs]

Summary

What we're after:
To better handle messaging to users while our website is down, we need to create a stand-alone page that can be served up to inform users.

Completion criteria

• Mock up what this page will look like
• Static messaging page is accessible outside the CMS system

Tech steps or considerations

• Create a stand-alone public bucket that can be spun up when needed
• Create static HTML page with needed assets to so that it is able to run independently of the CMS system
• Make a plan about re-routing CMS traffic using proxy to this stand alone bucket in emergencies Split this into this ticket: Figure out how to point www.fec.gov to static emergency site #3735

[JonellaCulmer]

@patphongs Here's the draft static page.

@dorothyyeager @AmyKort
Please let me know your thoughts on the copy and anything else. I tried to incorporate some language that was empathetic and was not cliched like the "sorry for the inconvenience" line.

[dorothyyeager]

Thanks @JonellaCulmer - This is a good start. There's a bit of white space between the text and header so I wonder if we should make font bigger or move or make the seal more prominent.

I get what you are going for with your text edits. I'd suggest maybe editing "We know this impacts your day..." to read "We know this may interrupt your work..."? I'll defer to @AmyKort's thoughts on that though.

Maybe expand the second paragraph. Here's my suggested edit:

If you have any questions or feedback about the website, please contact us at webmanager@fec.gov. For assistance with questions about the FEC or the federal campaign finance law, please email info@fec.gov or call 800-424-9530.

(I left off the menu option so those who call can press 1, 2, 3 etc according to what they need. Info staff are able to route the emails through Service Now to other divisions as needed.)

[JonellaCulmer]

I'd also like to note here on the ticket that I believe we should improve on our status page to allow us to provide progress as it's happening. So when users would like a status it doesn't just say the same thing it said an hour ago. By progress, I mean significant progress without making promises like, "The site will be back in 10 minutes....we think we've figured it out."

By updates, I mean "The problem has been identified and we are working on a fix," or, "We have just implemented a fix and the website is fully functional again."

Here are some examples of status pages that provide this type of detail:

All three of these pages use Statuspage for their pages.

• Github: https://www.githubstatus.com/
• Mural: https://status.mural.co/
• Cloud.gov: https://cloudgov.statuspage.io/

Since this work sits outside of the scope of the static page, this would be a future iteration. This would be valuable to our end users and continue to build trust in our services and our data.

[patphongs]

I have the barebones of the new status page developed (see below). I still would need to make the "here's how you know" accordion to work. I'd like to revisit the purpose of this before pushing further with development though. The original concept was to route users to this emergency page if our entire site was down. Meaning redirecting users to this page outside of the CMS. But now we're scoping this page more as a possible "status" page, I think this could use some more thought. Perhaps we don't redirect users to an emergency page if we were down, but have a status page to link users to from our 500 error page. Our status page would indicate any problems and what we are doing to remediate. Perhaps also consider having a separate domain like status.fec.gov in order to keep this site going to inform users about our status. We can also consider having a separate app available for this status page. To ensure that it is not tied to our CMS but can be started and stopped as needed.

[JonellaCulmer]

@patphongs See @dorothy's comment with some text changes. #3694 (comment)

[AmyKort]

Looks great! Thanks!

[AmyKort]

Also, I think the idea of adding a way to give the status of the site is great, but I would really like to have the static page available quickly. Could we move forward with the current version, and look into making it more of a status page in a future iteration?

[patphongs]

@JonellaCulmer @AmyKort I've made the changes in text on my local development. We can spin this up on another S3 bucket. I can have it up fairly quickly, I would just need to configure the new bucket.

[patphongs]

This bucket has been created in our dev environment and can be started at any time we are ready to use it.