Rule one in the world of online: you do not go dark ever. As in never. As in only if you have an earthquake or a power outage or your server cluster blows, and even then, you better have figured out backs-ups and redundancies and co-locations and so on. Once CNET.com (my old stomping ground) went down when San Francisco had a power outage and it was down for about four hours. It was also 1996 and you can bet that doesn’t happen anymore.

Fast forward to today and we find out that the Gap (and sister store Old Navy) shut its site down for days on end in order to “re-design”. This is unthinkable, when you consider how important online selling is, how the Gap based its in-store inventory on a reduced model and then let the Web handle size 52 width jeans and 36 length pants and so on.

More on the Re-design Disaster Here