There have been a number of changes to the website in the past 24 hours. As a result you may have noticed some broken/non-loading images on your memorials in the past day, but everything should be working fine now.

Among the changes:

An additional Memorial Design Preview has been added for users who are not using Internet Explorer. There is a link to the new preview in your control panel, you can view it here: http://www.continulife.com/views/design_prev.html

The Grief and Mourning RSS Feed is now featured more prominently on the site. It will likely be new to many people as it was previously featured only on the main page. The feed is now visible on the right-hand sidebar on website pages and on the left-hand sidebar of memorials.

We’ve made some changes in terms of our advertisers and that’s reflected on the website. The ads now are more pertinent to the memorials in contrast to the wide range of advertisements that were featured previously.

We’ve launched a Memorial Gift Shop through Amazon.com. There are a variety of links and banners pointing to the new shop. You can access it at: http://shop.continulife.com

In addition there have been some minor graphical changes, just small stuff like the re-made buttons etc.

That’s likely going to be it for changes to the site over the next little while. If you have any questions or suggestions, please contact us via the support form on the website.

Hey everyone,

We’ve been holding steady for a bit as the site has continued to grow. Today we finalized nine new memorial designs that have been added to the website (giving us a grand total of 47). We’ve added 3 Christmas designs (giving us a total of 4 to choose from), an autumn design and a few others. The full list is below.

• Christmas Design 2 (Manger Scene)
• Christmas Design 3 (Santa Ornament)
• Christmas Design 4 (Cartoon Santa)
• Halloween Design
• Thanksgiving Dinner Design
• Autumn Leaves Design
• Winter In The Park Design
• Trees at Dusk Design
• Snowman (2) Design

The memorial design preview currently continues to only function in Internet Explorer. We’ll be looking into implementing a new type of preview that works in all browsers. Look for that over the next little while.

All memorial designs have been updated and completed.

The Memorial Design Preview has been updated as well, however it continues to be functional only in Internet Explorer. We’ll be looking into a solution for other browsers soon, as well. The Design Preview may load the old designs if you’ve been to the site recently, this is because the images are stored in your browser’s cache. To correct the problem you must clear your cache or just wait it out and eventually the new images will load.

We’ll be looking to add more memorial designs before the end of the year.

If you have any questions, comments or suggestion for additional designs, please contact us at: contact@continulife.com

Had a huge night last night, worked on the designs well into the early morning. The good news is that all but 3 of the new memorial designs are finished. The ones that are left include the Christmas Design, the Sports design and the Zoo Animals design. Those three are a little bit more complicated to convert, which is why they’ve been saved for last.

Right now, we sit at a total of 38 memorial designs, which I do believe is the most offered by any online memorial website on the Internet. In addition to those 38, we have about 4 or 5 designs that are very close to completion and will be added soon. Once those designs are added, we’re essentially going to consider the construction of the site completed. As always, there will be room for improvements and additions based on your feedback. However we will be moving into the second phase here, which will be a focus on both attracting new members and communicating and interacting with our existing members, when it comes to technical support and providing a greater avenue and outlet for grief support etc.

If you have any suggestions regarding the designs, or other aspects of the site, please let us know, since we’re in the planning stages, now’s the time to let your voice be heard.

Made some additional changes to the Candles template today, you can view that here:

http://www.continulife.com/index.php?action=memorial&hr=true&profile_id=1

We’ve put the entire content of the site in a white table, that will allow us to color the backgrounds of the memorials now. The USA Patriot #1 theme is also completed and uploaded, you can view an example of that here:

http://www.continulife.com/index.php?action=memorial&hr=true&profile_id=253

Those two will be the only redesigned memorials up for now. We’re going to complete the redesign of all the other designs and then upload them all at once, rather than one by one as suggested earlier (although you may notice us testing some of the designs online here and there). The good news is that we’ve created a set process that should make this much easier and faster to implement. That said, we’re probably looking at about a week or so for all of the designs to be updated.

Memorial design changes have been implemented faster than expected.

The main difference you’ll notice is that the header at the top of the memorials is now signifcantly larger. Only two designs have been completed so far, the default Continulife design and the Candles design. The two are slightly different, as the Continulife design features larger branding and a slightly different search bar (and placement). The rest of the designs will follow the Candles design in terms of layout and positioning.

We’ll be making the changes to each design one by one over the next few weeks, so you will all notice the differences at varying times, depending on the template you’ve currently selected.

The memorial design preview (currently only functional in Internet Explorer) will be updated to reflect the changes once all memorial designs have been completed, so until then some of the design previews will be outdated.

Finally if you fear change, fear not. The new designs are cleaner and a little bit spiffier, but the changes will not be incredibly drastic and the bottom two-thirds of the page will look the same as always.

If you have any questions, comments or suggestions, don’t hesitate to let us know.

New Candle Design Example:

http://www.continulife.com/index.php?action=memorial&hr=true&profile_id=1

New Default Continulife Design Example:

http://www.continulife.com/index.php?action=memorial&hr=true&profile_id=116

The loading problem associated with the in-page slideshows has now been largely fixed. The problem may pop up here and there if the images in the slideshow have not been resized and are overly large (4mb+). This will usually happen if you copy your images direct from your digital camera, which isn’t recommended. Other than that though, everything should be working fine.

With the addition of the slideshow to the memorial page now completed, the memorial page itself is now largely finalized. There will be some changes to the templates in the near future as well as some additional templates to be added in the next month or so.

Beyond that, we’re currently conceptualizing some new features that will be added to the website. We have a rather long list of ideas and features to introduce to the website, and now it’s just a matter of figuring out exactly how they will be implemented before implementing them.

The photo gallery slideshows have now been moved into the memorial pages themselves. This was mainly done so that the slideshows could be viewed with background music.

The slideshow will only appear in your memorial if you have more than one photo uploaded.

There are some minor issues with the display of the slideshow, but those seem to be restricted to large images only. We’re looking at ironing those issues out soon. Other than that, the slideshow feature seems to be fully functional, however there are some cosmetic changes we’ll be making to that aspect in the next day or two (buttons, placement etc).

As mentioned in the previous post, the Quick Links box has been implemented (much faster than we expected, as well).

Here’s what the Quick Links box looks like so you know what I’m referring to:

Right now the box contains 4 buttons when all sections of the memorial are filled out. If a certain section is left unfilled, the button link to that section will be absent. The only button that is permanently part of the bar is the Comments button. Basically this means memorials that have not filled out any sections will only contain one button (the Comments button).

The buttons themselves will vary depending on whether your loved one was male or female (ex: About Him/About Her). We’ve recognized that many memorials are in honour of more than one person (for example, stillborn twins), so we’ve added a plural option (About Them/Msg For Them). This is not automated, so if you’d like to have the plural buttons just fire us an email and we’ll make the switch for you. We hope to be going through all the memorials and making those changes ourselves anyway, though.

The Quick Links box is wide enough to fit a fifth button, and we’re considering placing a Slideshow button in the box for memorials that have uploaded more than one image. Clicking that button will move you down the page, where we hope to have the slideshow itself embedded into the memorial page, rather than on a page of its own. This will allow you to watch the slideshow while listening to music that you may have embedded from playlist.com. Should be pretty cool. More on that soon.

As mentioned in the previous post, the rose restriction has now been lifted and replaced with a daily restriction. Basically this means you can now leave a rose once a day, as opposed to once, period.

Next, we’re going to be working on the navigation a little bit over the next few days. This will come in handy mostly for those of you with very long memorials. We’ll be introducing some buttons just under the Share box. These will allow you to jump to the different sections of the memorial rather than scrolling through the entire page.

In addition to adding some new templates, we’re looking at making some improvements to the existing templates, so keep an eye out for those changes in the near future.