Funeral home website design for the reader who is not shopping

The brief for this one was different from every other design in the catalogue, and it changes everything about the layout. A restaurant’s website is read by somebody choosing where to eat. A funeral home’s is read by somebody whose parent died this morning, at 3am, on a telephone, who has never done this before and does not know what the first step is. So the first screen is not a photograph of the chapel and a services menu. It is a telephone number, the sentence “nothing has to be decided tonight”, and the five different answers to “where is the person now” — because whether you ring the hospice or ring 911 depends on that, and getting it wrong turns a hard night into a much harder one.

The second thing it does is be straight about money, which this trade is notoriously not. The design carries no price at all — that is a decision, and the site says so on its own home page: an invented figure on a demonstration would be worse than none, because somebody would plan against it. What it prints instead is the thing almost nobody prints: the sixteen standard categories a price list is built from, which is what makes two funeral homes comparable at all; the one fee that cannot be declined and why; the four things that actually move the total, in order; and the plain fact that a family is owed a printed list to keep, at the start of the conversation, and prices over the telephone without giving a name.

And then nine pages on what this business does not do — it does not sell the grave, it does not decide the cause of death, it does not lead the rite, it is not your lawyer, and it will not call a telephone call counselling. Several of those are things a family is routinely told the opposite of. A funeral home that says them first is doing the single most trust-building thing available to it, and the design is arranged so that a buyer can see exactly how those pages are built and rewrite them for their own firm.