Website Functionality – It's What's Inside That Keeps Them Coming Back
No matter which design approach you choose, the most important part of the project is determining what you want your site to achieve. Understanding your goal will help you to select the functionality within your website that will best meet your needs.
Visit our Marketing Strategies page to better identify what you want your website to achieve. Once you know if you want to Inform, Educate, provide an Interactive environment or create a Market Leading site select from the one of the packages that best fits your needs. Our Website Packages include the functionality and tools to reach your families.
Packages include the following Functionality and Tools:
- Memorialization
- Online Obituary Program – Service Schedule, Obituary, Guestbook and Flowers components provide the information your families are looking for.
- Obituary Themed Displays – The Themed Displays feature allows you to offer a choice of backgrounds and graphics to families when they create their loved ones online obituary.
- Obituary Notification Tool – Your website viewers can sign themselves up to be notified whenever you add a new obituary to your website.
- Memorial Picture Board – Help families share photos of their loved one by uploading their photos into a slideshow accessible on the obituary page.
- MemorialCast – Upload and display memorial videos or recorded funeral services for those that cannot come to your funeral home.
- Virtual Displays
- The Virtual Tour brings photos of your funeral home, staff and community events to life with a slideshow of images or videos. This component is available in a Standard, Gallery or Animated option depending on the number of photos and display format.
- Virtual Showroom - Whether you are looking for a Virtual Showroom to replace or enhance the "bricks and mortar" selection room in your funeral home or to add an internet option allowing families to view your merchandise, the Virtual Showroom will fit your needs. This module allows you to add, update or delete products, images and descriptions.
- Forms and Calculators
- Online Forms - Contact Us and Pre-planning forms are two of the most common forms that funeral homes use to collect information about the families visiting their site. Submitted forms are emailed to a specified email address for your retrieval.
- The Service Calculator tool allows your families to build a funeral or memorial with selected services and products and then create a cost estimate based on your prices. You can determine if you want families to print off their estimate or view only.
- Shopping Cart/eCommerce
- Memorial Products/Flowers - eCommerce functionality provides a easy way for customers to purchase the products you offer. Visitors can purchase memorial products, keepsakes, or flowers for families currently being served at your funeral home or a friend or family member experiencing a loss in another town or state.
- Caskets/Urns – Connecting your Virtual Showroom to your Shopping Cart functionality allows visitors to not only see the products that you provide, but to purchase them as well. While this feature may not be for every funeral home, there are some markets that require the flexibility that this functionality provides.
- Relationship-Building/Community Outreach Tools
- The Calendar of Events tool is a simple way to post events at the funeral home or in your community. Announcements are easy to enter by adding the Title, Date, Location and Subject (a short description of the event and directions.)
- The Newsletter tool, also called "What's New" allows you to easily post articles along with an image. The articles can be written by someone at the funeral home or be suggested links to community or memorial related information. This tool can be adapted to create a Testimonials page as well.
- The Blog feature, a newer component in funeral websites, is an interactive way to share stories about your funeral home and communicate information and insights about your business. It helps with content freshness, provides an avenue for customer feedback via comments, and gives search engines a steady supply of new content and pages to spider, helping bump up your site in search results.
- A Live News Feed gives you the ability to automatically pull in news stories or announcements from selected news sources.
- Website Tools
- Content Management System tool (CMS) - A CMS tool can be added to your new website to allow you to add, update, or delete text and photos at your convenience. With this tool you have the ability to make changes to information about your staff, location, services and any other content on your site. This functionality is accessed through an administration page on your website available only to you.
- FDMS Network Software Integration – Coming in 2011, if you are an FDMS Network user you will be able to access your website through your data management software to use your Virtual Showroom along with other parts of your site.
- Website Maintenance
- Domain Name Hosting – We can register a domain (funeralhomename.com) or we can take control of a domain that is transferred to us. Domain name registration fees and renewals are paid annually.
- Google Analytics - Using a web analytics (webstats) solution provides you with insights into your website traffic and marketing effectiveness. This powerful, flexible and easy-to-use feature allows you to see and analyze your traffic data.
- Search Engine Optimization – Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of making your website more readable for the search engines, like Google. By optimizing your website you are making the site rank for specific searches so the website will display higher than competing websites.
- Tagging – Tags are added to a link that when clicked on lands on your site. The tag passes on information such as where the visitor came from, whether the click was from a paid or organic search result, which specific ad was clicked, etc...
- Email Accounts - We can host email accounts for the funeral home staff that offer excellent spam monitoring and protection.
- Additional Services
- Social Media Management – Using social media allows you to proactively share information with the general public. A basic Facebook fan page and Twitter account will allow you to instantly push out all your content updates, news and announcements.
- Pop-Up Visitor Survey – Quality surveys are a key component of market research. A survey or poll can be periodically added to your site to gather specific feedback or offer a "free gift" for providing individual contact information.
- Multiple Location Integration - If your business consists of multiple locations, we can create designs that complement your common brand and/or connect locations through "mirrored sites" that give each a web presence, but efficiently reuse common pages.
