Good Website on Bird Flu.. Strange Though

www.pandemicflu.gov...

This website contains a buch of good information, but what bothers me is that it actually seems to have been put together in a relative hurry.

The whois info on it is here:

whois.sc...

Note it was registered (or first queried) in November of 2005. That's pretty fast to put together a website of this size. Something concerning perhaps?

yea, I wonder if that means something.
like.
if it was rushed, maybe something is happening, something we need to prepare for...

That isn't necessarily an indication that something's going on. It's not uncommon to develop and design a website long before you have the domain registered, and they don't exactly have a ton of "branding" on there--just the header image, which appears to be the same file spread across the site. Have one domain in mind while you're designing, turns out you don't get it (although I doubt there's too many people able to take a .gov domain), change the banner file with the new name and you're golden.

Another thing to keep in mind is that they probably had a ton of information ready to go, it was just a matter of putting it into HTML and throwing it on the web. Even an average software developer can write a utility to generate a website off of Word docs or text files. I've done it myself (not that it was ever used outside of testing, unfortunately...) and with a reasonable amount of organization it'd be fairly easy to take a couple of reams of info (links, reports, whatever) and merge it into a template.

Not saying that there isn't something going on, just can't really tell from this. Interesting site though

I'm a web developer, so I looked at the source code and examined the way the site was laid out, and it really doesn't appear to be developed by any automatic tool. The source code comments show that it is probably sill being developed, or at least there is some back and forth between the content guys and the designer / design team.

Of course its possible that they had alot of the information already there, and it only would take an average web designer about a week at most to put a site like this together, but the fact that it is even up is concerning.

It is being hosted by the Department of Health and Human Services, or at least in the same datacenter, as the IP is just a few digits away from dhhs.gov. Just one digit away from the surgen general's website, 137.187.25.12...


[edit on 29-1-2006 by gammahelixx]

I gave the code a quick glance, not enough to really look at the comments though. You're right, although just because I can't let my own "theory" die I'll add that files could've been generated and then tweaked (with comments) Enough of that though.

It is interesting to say the least. I'm more in thinking that they're probably just wanting something up because the topic is more well known now, so they need to look like they're doing something on the PR side.