Web Development and Technology Blog

After several bumps along the road, the web site for the Pearson Funeral Home, the oldest family-owned funeral home in Louisville, Kentucky has been launched.

The look of the site has been over-hauled and updated.  Additionally the major changes are:

• Virtual guestbook – People can easily add condolences to a virtual guestbook, that the staff moderates
• The obituaries are easier for the non-technical staff to input and update and post pictures
• Custom content management system – staff can add new pages and edit all existing content
• Easier navigation, including dynamic menus

No site is ever finished, but it is nice to get this site launched and for visitors to get to use it.  Not maybe the most exciting site, but a great marriage of function to purpose.

It always seems that maintaining and updating your own personal site is the hardest and most neglected. Ironic, considereing you contastantly tell clients that fresh, relevant content is the most important thing to keep visitors returning and improving search results. However, since I don’t pay myself, paying customers always come first.

So as I was looking at my site to get it up-to-date, adding my new job and such, I realized that I needed to add links to all my social networks. Previously, I only had a link to MySpace, which my wife and kids use. At the time I created that, I never thought I would have so many accounts littered all over the place.

I tried at one point to keep them separate, so that Facebook only had personal friends and LinkedIn had colleagues, but that didn’t work as planned, as some personal friends only had LinkedIn and some colleagues only had Facebook, so I ended up with duplicates. In addition, I now Twitter a fair amount so I am following a cross-section of people there. And finally I am using FriendFeed to aggregate some of the data (you know, because Scoble says everyone will leave Twitter and go to FriendFeed, so hate to be left behind :-p). This is only the tip of the iceberg when you think about all the private social networks going up, I know I belong to one for Red Jumpsuit Apparatus powered by Ning among others.

I think it is a big mess.

I know from each company’s perspective they need the traffic and users to get advertising to keep the platform free, but from the users perspective it is a nightmare to keep up with it all. I hope that Facebook Connect and the Google Friend Connect and the like are a step in the right direction. I think we need interoperability and we need to be able to control our own data. If I want my friends to follow me to Plaxo and FriendFeed and back to Facebook, they are my friends, I should have the options for what info gets shared and by whom and to where. Of course, it will take it a while to iron it all out, but till then feel free to add me/contact me, wherever you find me.