1. PURPOSE 

The purpose of this guide is two fold (1) to provide information on a National GACC website 

portal and (2) to provide general guidance on implementation of the Geographic Area 

Coordination Center website template.  

Specifically, this document will: 

  Provide the administrative means to initiate and maintain the GACC web system 

operationally 

  Provide details on the development of a national website 

  Provide a design template for standardization and/or re design of current GACC 

websites 

  Provide details on the availability and use of a centralized web server 

It has been written and provided to you by the National GACC Website Committee, a sub 

committee of the National Predictive Services Group. 

2. INTRODUCTION 

The first Geographic Area Coordination Center (GACC) website was posted sometime during 

the period 1996/97.  Which GACC site was posted first is not known, nor does it matter in the 

overall scheme of things.  What does matter is the level of dependency in which the Wildland 

fire community has come to demand information, intelligence, and predictive services products 

posted on these sites. 

Over the years as GACC websites were being developed and posted on the Internet, a number 

of issues have arisen for GACC web managers to ponder.  First off, visitors moving from one 

GACC website to another would often have difficulty in finding similar or same products.  

Firewalls established by several agencies where GACC websites were hosted, often made it 

difficult for visitors getting to the GACC site.  And, by GACC websites being hosted on different 

agency servers, it often made the visitor to have to create their own bookmarks.   

Thus, in November 2002 at the National Predictive Services and Intelligence Meeting, a GACC 

Website Development Task Group was formed to look into and propose developing a basic, 

standardized layout for GACC websites, and to see if there could be a centralized web server 

for all GACC sites to be hosted on.  

In early 2003, the Task Group received word that space was available on the FAMWEB server 

for hosting GACC websites.  The only requirement the Task Group would have to follow up with 

would be to find its own Universal Resource Locator (URL) address.  By late 2003, the Task 

Group received word from the owners of the NIFC.GOV domain, that they would be able to 

provide the GACCs with their own distinct URL as part of the NIFC.GOV domain.   

Once the server and domain name was established, the Task Group reviewed all GACC 

websites looking at the differences, similarities, and/or any standard applications that could be 

National GACC Website and GACC Website Template  

3

  Implementation Guidelines