Case Study · Funeral Home · Evansville, IN
Your Website Shows Raw Code to Grieving Families. That's Not a Small Problem.
Boone Funeral Home — Evansville, IN · boonefuneralhome.net
Obituary dates display as Jun 22, 2026\Evansville, _local_florist_ is a live placeholder in the resources section, and the testimonials section renders quotFredquot instead of a real name. Three broken signals on a site that grieving families trust.
Live right now
The Evidence
Three separate template/rendering failures are visible to every visitor on boonefuneralhome.net right now: broken obituary dates, an unreplaced placeholder, and a garbled testimonial name.
Boone Funeral Home serves Evansville families during the hardest moments of their lives. The website is often the first place those families go — to look up obituaries, find contact information, or decide whether to trust this home with their loved one. Right now, it's showing them broken code.
The Business
Boone Funeral Home at boonefuneralhome.net is an established Evansville funeral home where families come to honor their loved ones. The site needs to carry one thing above all else: trust. When a grieving family lands on the site to look up a tribute and instead sees garbled text, unrendered placeholders, and broken code, that trust evaporates immediately.
None of these issues are cosmetic edge cases. They're visible to every visitor, on every device, every time — and they've likely been there for weeks or months.
What We Found
Obituary Dates Display as Jun 22, 2026\Evansville
The obituary data pipeline is outputting raw escape characters — backslashes are visible as plain text inside family tributes. A parent, sibling, or child who searches for a loved one's obituary and sees Jun 22, 2026\Evansville instead of a clean date and location doesn't think “software bug.” They think the home doesn't care enough to proofread.
_local_florist_ Is Live on the Site
A template variable — the kind that gets swapped out during setup — was never replaced. The sidebar or resources section displays the literal text _local_florist_ to visitors. It looks unfinished because it is. For a funeral home, where attention to detail is a core value proposition, this signals something families shouldn't have to see.
Testimonials Section Renders quotFredquot
An HTML encoding failure left the name “Fred” rendering as quotFredquot in the testimonials block. Instead of a real person vouching for the service, families see garbled code. Testimonials are the highest-trust content on any funeral home website — and this one is broken.
What We'd Fix
A clean, trustworthy site that works the way grieving families need it to.
Obituary Rendering — Clean Output Every Time
Audit and fix the data pipeline pulling obituary dates and locations. No raw escape characters, no backslashes — clean, properly formatted output on every tribute. A family reading about their loved one should see their name and dates, nothing else.
Replace All Placeholder Content
Swap _local_florist_ and every other unrendered template variable with real, curated local resources — or remove the section entirely if it's not being actively maintained.
Fix Testimonial Markup
Properly encode and render all quotation marks and names so testimonials build trust the way they were meant to. Real names, real quotes, properly displayed — no code artifacts.
Full Site QA Pass
A systematic review of every section for additional placeholder text, encoding failures, and broken elements. What we've found are the visible problems — a full audit catches everything that's hiding below the fold.
Spec Redesign Deliverables
- ✓Obituary data pipeline fixed — clean dates and locations, no escape character artifacts
- ✓All placeholder content removed or replaced with real local resources
- ✓Testimonials rebuilt — properly encoded names and quotes that build trust
- ✓Full QA pass — every section reviewed for additional failures
- ✓Mobile-optimized — families search for funeral homes from their phones
- ✓Evansville funeral home SEO — structured to be found by local families first
The Opportunity
Families searching for funeral homes in Evansville make that choice under enormous emotional pressure. They're looking for a home that feels trustworthy, careful, and present. A site showing quotFredquot and _local_florist_ communicates the opposite — even if the care Boone provides is exceptional.
These aren't design problems. They're maintenance failures that compound over time. Every family who sees them leaves with a worse impression than the service deserves.
Note: Outreach for this business is via direct email to jordanduncan.fd@gmail.com — a personal Gmail account listed as the business contact, which is itself an unusual signal worth noting in the conversation.
Your website is the first place families turn when they need you most.
Let's make sure it doesn't fail them.
Website management packages start at $597/month.
See what we'd fix on your site
We'll review your website top to bottom, record a 10-minute Loom walkthrough of exactly what's broken, and deliver a PDF report with prioritized fixes — in 48 hours.
No commitment. No pitch deck.