Q:What does AVOID mean? A:AVOID is Dovetail's exclusive Advanced Virtual Online Interruption Detection System. Intended to provide an alternate location for hosting information about your institution in the event that the main website is unavailable. It helps to ensure that your customers will not be lost during a web service outage. If your site is ever unavailable, the AVOID system would provide an alternate hosted "mini site" for information on how to reach you while maintaining your brand. This helps to ensure our customers are not lost due to confusion or lack of information.
Q:Why do I need to AVOID my site? A:Being able to give your customers the ability to still see your branding and contact information gives reassurance and direction when the site is not working. If you do not have a contingency plan, customers could get error messages which could lead to customer dissatisfaction, poor search engine rankings, and be a detriment to your brand image.
Q:How does AVOID work? A:Our service polls the website's network on a regular basis to determine if the site is available. Should either the network, or your site be unavailable to the outside world, the AVOID service will route to your "mini site".
Q:What is a "mini site"? A:The "mini site" is a self-contained landing page that alerts your customers that your website is currently offline. It will retain the look of your site design with links to any third-party sites (such as online banking) and contact information. No other navigation will be available.
Q:What should the "mini site" say? A:Messaging can be of your choosing, we recommend something similar to "We are sorry, our web site is currently undergoing maintenance. Please try again later. In the meantime, you can contact us at XXX-XXX-XXXX. If you would like to reach our online banking system, click here."
Q:How do I build the "mini site"? A:You can build your "mini site" using whatever tools you would usually use to build a website. You can build it from scratch or start with a page from your existing site. Just make sure to copy any images and style files to the same directory as your site .html file and to reference all external files using relative URLS in your code.
Q:How do I install the AVOID system? A:Fill out the form on this page and we will be in touch with you to get you started on your AVOID system. Once ready to go live, contact us at customerservice@dovetailinternet.com and we can coordinate moving the site to the live server.
