Pre-staged state funeral website for President George H.W. Bush

Challenge

State funerals are planned years in advance but triggered with no public notice. Joint Task Force-National Capital Region (JTF-NCR), under the U.S. Army Military District of Washington, needed a commemorative website for President George H.W. Bush ready to go live the moment it was needed: built, tested, and pre-staged well ahead of time, with no room for error once the event began.

Approach

The site was built and staged in advance, then deployed on activation. It had to hold up under a massive, instantaneous traffic spike with no warning period to scale infrastructure reactively. After the state funeral, the work continued: Aurathmic redesigned the standing contingency website that JTF-NCR keeps ready for future use.

Result

The pre-staged site went live cleanly and handled over 200,000 visits in a single day without incident. The redesigned contingency site remains in place, ready for the next activation.