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. Nearly everyone who arrives is in one of four situations, and the site should be organised around those.

1. Someone has died, or is dying. They need a phone number, they need to know what happens in the next twelve hours, and they need to know PMA is not itself a funeral home. This is the least forgiving situation on the site and currently the worst served: the page for it sits inside the Member Hub menu, and the 24-hour number appears on only 2 of 181 pages.
2. They are planning ahead — for themselves or a parent. They want to know the options, what each costs, and what to sign. Today this material is split across three separate sections (Education, Member Hub › Planning Documents, and Planning Information), so the same question is answered in three places and started in none. The closest thing to a starting point is a workshop page filed under Education.
3. They are deciding whether to join, or they already have. What does $99 buy, which funeral homes honour it, and — if they are already a member — where are the forms and how do they update their address. This is the best-served audience already: the join page is the most-linked page on the whole site, 33 links from 18 different pages.
4. They are here for the work, not for a funeral. Journalists, legislators, other non-profits, funeral professionals, and members who care about the price survey and the legislation. The price survey is the second most-linked page on the site (25 links from 14 pages), yet six of the nine Advocacy pages have no link into them from any page's text at all — only from the menu.

These four are not a guess about visitors. They are what the site's own writing already points at: strip out the menu and the footer, and the links inside the body copy converge on five destinations — Join, Donate, the Price Survey, the Forms, and the Partner Funeral Homes list. The writing knows what the site is for. The menu does not.

A fifth category, About, holds everything that is PMA talking about itself — history, staff, the Co-op, financials, news, donate. That is a real category but it is not a situation anyone arrives in, which is why it sits last and why Donate becomes a button rather than a menu section.

The clearest symptom: "When a Death Occurs" is filed under Member Hub — the sixth of ten items in that menu, sitting between "Contracted Providers" and "Digital Document Storage Service" — 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. It is presented as one member service among ten, on the same visual footing as "Update My Contact Information", under a heading that tells a non-member the section isn't for them. 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

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.

6The site on a phone

Two things are wrong at the same time, and they pull in opposite directions: the brand shrinks and the text grows. The person most likely to be on a phone is the one who has just been told that somebody died.

The logo, and the line underneath it

Your wordmark is a single picture — a 500 × 146 pixel PNG — with all three lines baked into it as pixels: "People's Memorial", "Association", and "Funeral Education & Advocacy since 1939". None of that is text. It cannot reflow, it cannot be resized on its own, and it cannot be read aloud.

On a phone the whole picture is squeezed into whatever room is left beside the menu button, which puts that third line at roughly six pixels tall. Legible small print starts around eleven. It is not small; it is gone. The same squeeze softens the leaf mark, because a photograph-style PNG blurs when it is scaled down, where a proper vector logo stays sharp at any size.

Two fixes, both small:

• Take the tagline out of the picture and set it as real text next to or beneath the wordmark. It then scales, wraps on a narrow screen, gets read aloud, and gets indexed. This is the better fix.
• Or drop it below a certain screen width and show only the leaf and "People's Memorial Association", so the header stops presenting an unreadable smudge.

In either case the logo should be a vector file (SVG) rather than a 65-kilobyte PNG, so it is crisp on every screen and lighter on every page.

The text is too big, not too small

The stylesheet's very last rule sets the body copy on every interior page to 20 pixels, at every screen size, with no phone version at all. Homepage paragraphs are set to 24. This report is 16.

On a 400-pixel-wide phone that produces lines of about 27 characters. Comfortable reading is 45 to 75. On the donate page you sent, the sentence "There are many ways to give including writing PMA into your will" takes four lines. The consequence is that every page is two to three times longer than it needs to be, and the reader scrolls past the thing they came for.

The design does have phone rules — 82 of them at 640 pixels and 74 at 800 — but the type size sits outside all of them, as a global rule appended at the end of a 488-kilobyte stylesheet. That is why it never steps down. It is one line of CSS.

7Things that are simply broken

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

Links that open a new tab when they should not

You are right that this is not good behaviour, and it is not a one-off. 103 different links to other pages of your own site are set to open a new browser tab, appearing 420 times across the site.

The one you clicked is the worst case: the "Contact PMA" tile in the quick-links strip appears on all 199 pages, and every one of them opens a new tab. (The "Contact Us" item in the main menu behaves correctly — it is only the tile.) Beyond that, 73 pages have at least one more in their body text: "Take me to planning documents" on 10 pages, "Webinar Library" and "mission and vision of PMA" on 7 each, "Purchase Digital Document Storage" on 5.

Why it matters more than it sounds:

• It takes away the back button — the one control every visitor knows. In the new tab, Back is greyed out. There is no way back to what they were reading except closing the tab, which many people do not think to do.
• On a phone it is worse. Tabs are hidden behind a small numbered square. A visitor reading the planning-documents page who taps three links now has four tabs and no sense of where they came from. The screenshot you sent shows 14 open tabs — that is the shape of the problem.
• It is a decision taken away from the reader. Anyone who wants a new tab can already ask for one — middle-click, long-press, ctrl-click. A page that forces it is overriding a choice the visitor had already made.
• Screen-reader users get no warning. The focus moves to a new document with no announcement, which is a recognised accessibility failure.

What should keep it: downloads and outside websites. 26 links to your own PDFs — the price surveys, the Designated Agent form, the Ducks in a Row checklist — open in a tab, and that is the right call, because a download replacing the page a person is reading is its own kind of rude. 178 links to other organisations do too, which is a matter of taste rather than an error. The fix is narrow: remove target="_blank" from links that point at peoplesmemorial.org pages, and leave it on files and on other people's sites. In Firespring that is an edit to the link settings, mostly in one shared quick-links block plus about seventy body links. Every one of the 103 is listed by page in the full report.

• 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.

8What 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.

9What 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. Stop your own pages opening in new tabs. Start with the "Contact PMA" quick-link, which does it on all 199 pages.
   Half a day. One shared block plus about seventy body links; leave PDFs and outside sites alone.
4. Set a phone size for body text, and take the tagline out of the logo image. The type rule is one line of CSS; the tagline becomes real text beside the wordmark, or is hidden on small screens.
   A day. Changes how every page reads on a phone.
5. 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.
6. Rewrite the homepage's first screen and change "Submit" to "Join for $99".
   A week. Uses only facts already on the site.
7. Settle the numbers: one membership figure, one partner-network figure, and fix the $50 preview text on the join page.
   An afternoon.
8. 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.
9. 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.

10How 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.