Would you like to be buried or cremated? A fancy casket or a biodegradable coffin? Ashes sprinkled over the Puget Sound or launched into space? A somber church service or a party with live music?<\/p>\n
These are all questions you now can answer – long before you kick the bucket – on one Kent couple\u2019s new Web site, www.thefuneralsite.com.<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cThis sort of picks up on a trend we\u2019re seeing, how so much of a person\u2019s life is impacted by the Web these days,\u201d said David Johnson, who owns the online company with his wife, Anna Copley. \u201cWe\u2019re just sort of bringing that over to the funeral-planning side of things. It\u2019s sort of a last frontier of the Internet.\u201d<\/p>\n The couple launched the site last October and now operate it full time out of their Kent home. Planning one\u2019s own funeral is only part of the comprehensive site, which also provides tools and resources for funeral planning and one of the first online, local funeral guides in the country.<\/p>\n Johnson said his wife got the original idea for the site when she met an elderly woman with an unusual line of work in the industry. The woman was a \u201cdeath doula,\u201d a traditional helper for families tending to the body of a deceased member in the home, without the use of a mortician.<\/p>\n \u201cIt just got us thinking about the industry and what we could bring to it,\u201d Johnson said.<\/p>\n Johnson worked in the software industry and his wife was a public defender, but as parents of two children, the couple always wanted to start a business were they could work from home. They saw this as a perfect opportunity.<\/p>\n The main site links users to providers of all funeral-related products and services and offers reading material and other types of funeral-planning tools. All the site\u2019s features are free for users, the site generating revenue from funeral businesses who pay to be linked to its pages.<\/p>\n After launching in October, Johnson and Copley decided to give the site a more local focus, creating the Seattle Funeral Guide, which can be accessed on the main site or separately at www.seattlefuneralguide.com.<\/p>\n \u201cAs we worked through and talked to vendors, we found that there was a great need for a local-focused site,\u201d Johnson said. \u201cTo the best of our knowledge, this is the first local site in the U.S., and certainly the first in the Seattle area.\u201d<\/p>\n The guide, which covers the area from Everett to Tacoma and the Kitsap Peninsula to North Bend, connects users with funeral resources in their own backyards. It includes features such as a map of funeral homes in the area and lists of possible funeral venues, musicians, event planners and clergy. They also list articles on the subject that are specific to the Puget Sound area.<\/p>\n The couple also recently added the self-planning feature, called \u201cMy Funeral,\u201d which allows users to create a profile and guides them through questions to help them map out their own ceremony.<\/p>\n \u201cWe sort of lead you through the process with tips that give you ideas, and you can fill out as much or as little as you want,\u201d Johnson said.<\/p>\n Users then can e-mail their final plans to family members to serve as a guide when the time comes, he said.<\/p>\n Another unique facet of the site is its \u201cGo Green\u201d feature, which outlines the increasingly popular \u201cgreen funeral\u201d and provides resources to plan an environmentally friendly funeral. The feature can be accessed through the main site or by visiting www.thegreenfuneralsite.com.<\/p>\n A green funeral includes practices like putting the body on dry ice instead of embalming it with chemicals, and burying the body in a simple, biodegradable casket.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a trend that\u2019s becoming more and more popular, especially around here,\u201d Johnson said.<\/p>\n Whatever kind of funeral the user chooses, Johnson said, the Web site is intended to make the complex planning process easier.<\/p>\n \u201cThe funeral-planning process can be a difficult process, one that people don\u2019t really want to face,\u201d Johnson said. \u201cWe provide tools and options so they can explore this process without any pressure and at their own pace. In their own home, they can basically figure out everything they need for an end-of-life celebration.\u201d<\/p>\n The Funeral Site<\/b><\/p>\n Kent-based online company providing local resources for funeral planning. Visit www.thefuneralsite.com<\/a> or www.seattlefuneralguide.com.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Would you like to be buried or cremated? A fancy casket or a biodegradable coffin? Ashes sprinkled over the Puget Sound or launched into space? A somber church service or a party with live music?
\nThese are all questions you now can answer – long before you kick the bucket – on one Kent couple\u2019s new Web site, www.thefuneralsite.com.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":106,"featured_media":19238,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-19237","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19237"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/106"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19237"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19237\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19238"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19237"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19237"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19237"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=19237"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}