Dipping into the Blogpond

At the beginning of November 2005, a friend of ours died. He was more a “friend of a friend” I suppose, we’d see him at John’s functions a few times a year. But we liked Billy and when he died suddenly we wanted to go to the funeral and pay our respects.

Billy died in somewhat sudden and unusual circumstances. As it happened it was 3 weeks between his death and the funeral. Billy lived alone in Sydney, but was not originally from Sydney. His family were scattered. It was very difficult to find out when the funeral would be. We’re not big newspaper buyers – would it be in the Herald or Telegraph or a local paper and if so, which one? Would the funeral in fact be in Sydney or in his family’s home town. Sure we could keep ringing John, or hope that he would remember to contact us, but as more time progressed we kept thinking that we’d missed it.

The internet has spoiled us. We expect to get the information we are looking for NOW if not sooner. So, I turned to the internet. I realised that, in Sydney, we had 2 main sites for funeral notices – the Sydney Morning Herald (which also link notices from The Age, The Leader, The Newcastle Herald and Illawarra Mercury) and News Limited. I couldn’t believe that there wasn’t one site where you could find notices from all around Australia.

Not only was it very difficult to find the notices on these sites and the URLs via Google (they have since made them somewhat easier to find), they are also really unattractive and somewhat undignified in their presentation. Additionally, the News site only leaves the notices displayed for one week, then they are gone forever. The number of enquiries we get for old details is incredible. People want access to this information.

A further criticism of the News site is that they hyperlink the name of the deceased. I don’t have a problem with hyerplinking per se, but they link back to the main page of whatever newspaper site the notice initially appeared in. To me, this is irreverent and tacky.

So I thought, surely there’s a need for a site like this. I checked out sites in the States (they really have their stuff together over there) and the fact there really wasn’t any competition in Australia and I thought “why not give it a go”?

Had it not been for the fact that we’d commissioned Alliance for dLook already, it would have gone into the “too hard” basket, another idea that never reached fruition. But I had the tools.

The Obits website was rolled out in 2 months, and is just about to celebrate its first birthday. Creating a website really is like having a baby. Time consuming, sleep depriving, teething problems and the joys when it takes its “first steps”. There have been some interesting challenges along the way, but I’ll save those for another post.