Website review · September 2026

peoplesmemorial.org

What is actually on the site, why it feels crowded, how it should be reorganised, and what to fix first.

Prepared for the Executive Director, People's Memorial Association. Every number in this document was counted from the live site on 5 September 2026 — all 287 addresses, 444,158 words, and 722 images and documents were downloaded and measured. Nothing here is an impression.

The short version: the site is not too big. It is too wide. There are only about 153 real pages, but the menu offers 82 places to go on every single page, and almost nothing on the site links to anything else — so the menu has to carry all the weight. The writing is good and honest; it is simply in the wrong order, with the most convincing facts near the bottom of long pages and the most important page for a grieving family buried 22 items deep in a dropdown.

1The reorganisation

This is the recommendation, first, because it is the thing worth doing.

The site is currently organised by who inside PMA owns the page — Member Hub, Education, Community Support, Advocacy, About. A visitor does not know or care which department owns anything. They arrive with one of four situations, and the site should be organised around those.

The clearest symptom: "When a Death Occurs" is filed under Member Hub, as the 22nd item in that dropdown, below "Sea Scattering Providers" — even though the page itself says PMA is not a funeral home, and even though the person who needs it most may not be a member. Meanwhile "Community Support" contains both support for PMA (Donate, Volunteer, Legacy Giving) and support for the visitor (Financial Assistance, Grief Support, Legal Resources). Those are opposite things under one label.

Five categories instead of five departments

Menu label	The question it answers
A Death Has Occurred	Someone has died, or is about to. What do I do right now?
Plan Ahead	What are my options, what do they cost, what paperwork do I need?
Membership	What do I get for $99, how do I join, which funeral homes, I'm already a member.
Advocacy	The price survey, the legislation, filing a complaint, professional training.
About	Who PMA is, the Co-op, the team, news, events, financials, contact. Donate becomes a button in the header, not a menu item.

The menu, before and after

A Death Has Occurred   Plan Ahead              Membership             Advocacy            About              [Donate]
  What to do first       Your options             Why join ($99)         Price survey         Who we are
  Call 888-762-2762      Planning forms           Join now               Current priorities   & the Co-op
  Financial help           Espanol / Chinese      Gift a membership      Issues               Team
  Partner funeral homes  Your legal rights        Partner funeral homes  Wins                 News & events
  Grief support          Paying / prepaying       Other partners         File a complaint     Newsletter
  After the funeral      Ducks in a Row           For employers          For professionals    Financials
                         Webinars                 Update my details      Speakers             Volunteer / Jobs
                         Burial plots                                                         Contact / FAQ

Why 287 addresses are only 153 pages

The apparent vastness is mostly the software, not content you commissioned. Firespring generates extra web addresses for the same page:

• 28 addresses are pure duplicates — the same page reachable three or four ways. Three separate donate addresses all serve the same 70-word donation box.
• 65 of the addresses come from four pages. The staff page generates 16 (one per bio), "Deathcare Professionals" generates 25, the Speakers Bureau 13, Planning Information 12. Each of those should be one page with sections, not twenty-five pages of 90 words each.
• Planning material is filed in three different sections at once, and prices in two. Some of these pages are word-for-word identical to each other under different addresses.

Collapsing the duplicates and merging the stubs takes the site from 153 pages to roughly 50 — without deleting a single piece of real content.

The part that must not be skipped

2Nothing on the site links to anything else

This is the finding behind the crowding, and it is the one that surprised me most.

Ignore the menu for a moment and look only at links inside the actual writing — the way a normal page says "here's what to read next". By that measure, 108 of the site's 181 addresses cannot be reached from the homepage at all. Thirty-four pages have no incoming links from any page's text whatsoever, including the FAQ and all six Advocacy pages. Thirty-five pages are dead ends: you arrive and there is nowhere to go next.

That is why the menu has to be 82 items wide. It is the only way anything is findable, so everything gets added to it. The menu grows, which makes it harder to use, which makes people add more to it. Reorganising the menu without also linking pages to each other will not hold.

Counted another way: there are about 7.5 words of menu and footer for every 1 word of actual content on this site. The full text of the privacy policy and terms of use is printed on every single page — that alone is the largest single block of repeated text on the site.

3The homepage

The homepage has no main heading, and its first screen never says what People's Memorial is. It opens with a seven-slide rotating banner. The second slide is an advertisement for an outside urn retailer. The fourth offers the annual report as an 18-megabyte download — large enough to stall on a phone.

Then the first paragraph:

"Thought-leader" appears on six pages. It is the kind of phrase that tells a stranger nothing and costs a little trust. Here is the same information written for the person reading it:

Every fact in that rewrite is already on your site. The three buttons cover the only three reasons anyone arrives: to plan, because someone died, or to check prices.

Underneath, replace the marketing slides with the three strongest numbers you own — which currently sit at paragraphs nine through twelve of the Member Benefits page, where almost nobody reaches them:

4The page a family needs at 2 a.m.

The 24-hour number, 888-762-2762, appears on 2 of 181 pages. On the "When a Death Occurs" page itself, the number does not appear in the text until the sixth paragraph. The page is titled "PMA | Contact | Report a Death Seattle WA". There is no link to it in the header, and none on the homepage.

The site already contains the best sentence anyone has written on this subject. It is just not at the top:

Note the third sentence. The fact that a family can join at the moment of need and still save money currently appears on exactly one page — the financial assistance page — and not on the page where the money is actually being spent.

5The words

The writing on this site is honest, knowledgeable and often very good. The problem is placement and posture, not talent.

The ask is phrased eleven different ways

Counted across the whole site, the membership call to action appears as "Join Now Online", "Become a Member", "Become a PMA Member", "Become a PMA Member and save 15%", "BECOME A MEMBER NOW", "Sign up as a PMA Member", "I want to buy a membership for myself", and five more. The donate ask has eleven variants of its own. Only two of the join phrasings mention the benefit, and none mentions the price.

Eleven wordings is not a style problem. It means no wording has been chosen and given the job of carrying the price and the benefit.

The site talks about itself more than to the reader

Of 96 page openings, 38 begin with the organisation and 8 begin with the reader. Across the site, PMA names itself about 29 times per thousand words, against 19 uses of "you" or "your". There are 86 exclamation marks.

Your best facts are buried

The dollar savings, the 708% price spread, the member-owned funeral home, seven dated changes to state law, the 24-hour line, instant membership activation, and the fact that PMA takes no industry money — all of it is on the site. Each one sits low on a long page, and none of them is next to the join form or on the donate page. The donate page has no persuasive copy at all; it is a payment box on an otherwise empty page.

One example of candour worth promoting rather than hiding: the financials page states plainly that "PMA's average donation size is $20." Most organisations would edit that out. It is exactly the sort of line that makes a stranger believe the rest.

Eight inconsistencies that quietly cost trust

• Membership is given as 72,000, 71,000 and 70,000 in different places.
• The partner network is "over 30 funeral homes" in some places and "over 20" in others.
• The join page's preview text says $50 while the page body says $99 — so the $50 figure is what appears in search results and when the link is shared.
• Statewide services are described on pages titled "…in Seattle".
• The no-refund notice sits below the credit card fields.
• The financial assistance fund is named two different ways.
• The "Give Monthly" page's claim about what a monthly gift covers does not follow from the site's own published figures.
• Questions a hesitant person actually asks — "I already prepaid, is this still worth it?", "what about my spouse?", "is this only Seattle?" — are not answered anywhere.

6Things that are simply broken

209 content problems were found. Twenty-two are urgent. The ones that matter:

• 14 internal links lead to an error page. The worst is /member-hub/forms.html, broken on seven pages.
• Your "email us" links are broken by the anti-spam trick that hides them. The addresses are written in a scrambled code so that spam robots cannot read them — but the website software then treats the scrambled code as a page name. Two of these links serve an error page instead of opening a mail window. A third, on the plot-donation page, is a plain address used as a page name with the same result.
• 30 links to other organisations' websites now lead to pages that no longer exist — including the Washington Department of Health, Five Wishes, End of Life Washington, and a training provider whose pages are linked 17 times.
• Real typos, including "inturment" (one paragraph away from a correctly spelled "inurnment"), "emblaming", "premesis", "industy", and "Estate Taxes Made Easy withTiffany Gorton" with the space missing.
• Repeated words: "PMA and and its allies", "education has has been".
• Four buttons go nowhere, including "View the FFA Guidelines & Application".
• 131 pages share their title with at least one other page — 24 pages are all called "Professional development for death care and funeral professionals" — and 26 web addresses serve identical text. Both push your pages down in search results.
• Spanish and Chinese are one page each, reachable only from the menu, marked in the site's code as English, and containing broken links. They read as an afterthought rather than a language option.

7What is good and should not be touched

The education section is the best-written part of the site. "What are my choices?", "Who are my legal next of kin?" and "Should I prepay?" are clear, honest and written for the reader. The FAQ answers have real voice — "No. And you don't need a reservation!" and "Members are not charged extra if you die at home or outside of business hours". The price tables are exactly what a consumer advocate should publish. The Advocacy Wins list is a genuine record of seven changes to Washington law and needs nothing but to be made visible.

None of the recommendations here involve rewriting any of that. They involve moving about nine existing sentences to the tops of the pages where a decision gets made.

8What to do first

1. Publish the annual report and the 990, or change the sentence.
   An afternoon. It is the transparency page.
2. Fix the 14 broken internal links and the scrambled email links.
   A day. People are hitting error pages today, including on "email us".
3. Put "Someone has died" in the header on every page, with the phone number on the page's first screen.
   A day, no reorganisation required. Highest human value on this list.
4. Rewrite the homepage's first screen and change "Submit" to "Join for $99".
   A week. Uses only facts already on the site.
5. Settle the numbers: one membership figure, one partner-network figure, and fix the $50 preview text on the join page.
   An afternoon.
6. Merge the four auto-generated sections — staff bios, Deathcare Professionals, Speakers Bureau, Planning Information — into one page each.
   Two weeks. Removes 61 pages without losing a word of content.
7. Then the reorganisation, with the full forwarding table written before anything moves.
   A project. Do not start it before step 6, and do not start it without the forwarding list.

9How this was done

Every page, image, document, stylesheet and font on peoplesmemorial.org was downloaded exactly as the site served it — 287 web addresses, 722 files, 348 megabytes, including 436 images and 75 PDFs. All 444,158 words were extracted into a single file, with the repeated menu and footer text labelled so it could be separated from real page content. The numbers in this review were then counted from that copy rather than estimated by looking at the site.

Nothing was changed on the live site, and nothing was rebuilt. This is a measurement, and the full technical record — including every error with the sentence it appears in and every page it affects — sits behind it.