Funeral homes · Website design
The obituaries are the website. Everything else is the lobby.
On a funeral home's site, obituaries draw roughly five times the traffic of every other page combined. Almost no funeral home website is built as though that is true. Mine are.
What this trade actually needs
Four things most web designers miss.
A funeral home's website has a harder job than most: it has to be found by someone searching a name at eleven at night, and it has to be legible to someone who is not, at that moment, a careful reader.
- 01
The obituary is the front door, not a sub-page
People arrive by searching a person's name, not the firm's. Each obituary needs its own real address, its own title, its own share preview, and it has to load fast on a phone on a bad connection. If your obituaries live inside a leased widget you do not control, that traffic belongs to the widget, not to you.
- 02
The Funeral Rule is a design constraint, not a legal footnote
The FTC requires a general price list and governs how prices are presented. That shapes the page. I will not invent a price, round one, or write "packages from" over a number you did not give me — and I will tell you where your current site is already doing that.
- 03
Register: died, passed, or homegoing
Which word a firm uses is not a style preference — it reflects the families it serves and the traditions it keeps. A homegoing service is not a generic funeral with a different label. That choice gets made with you, in writing, before any copy is drafted, and then it holds across every page.
- 04
Most firms are renting their own website
A large share of funeral homes sit on a leased template from a supplier, with the obituary archive, the domain, or both held in the supplier's account. The first thing I do is find out who actually owns what. Sometimes the answer is that you should stay where you are, and I will say so.
Asked by directors
The questions funeral directors ask.
Usually, and it matters more than anything else on the site — years of archived obituaries are years of accumulated search traffic and family memory. Whether it is possible depends on who holds the data. That is the first thing I check, before quoting anything, because the answer changes the size of the job.
The FTC's Funeral Rule governs the general price list and how it must be made available. I build the page so it is straightforward to comply and straightforward for a family to read — but I am not your lawyer, and I will not put a number on your website that you have not given me and confirmed.
Sometimes you shouldn't. A leased site that works, that you control, and that keeps your archive is not worth replacing for looks alone. The reasons to move are usually ownership, speed, or the fact that your firm looks identical to nine others in the county because you are all renting the same template.
No — not without their explicit permission, and generally not at all. Testimonials from grieving families are the one piece of marketing I would rather you didn't have. The site can be persuasive on the strength of the firm's own history instead, which is what both of the studies above do.
Begin
Start with a question.
Tell me how long the firm has been going and what your current site gets wrong. You will get a straight answer on whether the studio is the right fit, in the first reply.
Monday to Friday
An email reaches the same person directly. If you would rather set the brief out in full, with what you need, where to start and how quickly, there is a short form on the studio page, and it goes to the same address.