Case study
Payneham & Dudley Park Cemeteries
Payneham & Dudley Park Cemeteries has served Adelaide's north eastern suburbs since 1845. Its visitors fall into three groups with almost nothing in common: people arranging a funeral this week, people pre-planning years ahead, and people visiting a grave. A fourth group, councils and community organisations, comes for the cemetery management arm.
Website
Brand
UX
UI
Sanity CMS
Development
Design Systems
12 weeks
from stakeholder workshop to launch, brand and website
26 pages
the team publishes and edits without a developer
4,700
new users in the first six months after launch
The website had not been updated since the early 2000s, and it showed. A family trying to find a grave, arrange a burial, or understand their memorial options was reading a site built for a different internet, on a phone it was never designed for.
The brand had the same problem. Two cemeteries and a management service, with nothing holding them together and nothing that reflected the care the team gives in person. Both jobs came as one brief: an identity worth the organisation's history, and a website that works.
Our thinking
We ran a workshop with key stakeholders from the organisation, then competitor research, user flows, content strategy and technical scoping, all before anything was designed.
The audiences decided the structure. A family arranging a funeral this week wants guidance and a phone number. Someone pre-planning wants to browse without pressure. Funeral directors want authority forms, price guides and the booking portal together, because they use them every week. Councils weighing up cemetery management want evidence the organisation is run properly. Each one got its own path through the site.
What we delivered
The identity came first: logo, brand mark, typography, colour and a style guide the team can hand to anyone. Then the content, written for four audiences rather than one.
The site runs on React and Next.js, hosted on Vercel, with Sanity CMS behind it. Each cemetery has its own section carrying its history and memorial options. Funeral directors get a single page with the forms, pricing and the online booking portal. A notice bar handles office closures and public holidays. Memorial search runs through the Ever After database, linked from the top of every page.
The Sanity setup was built to be run by the office, not by us. Upcoming services, community events, price guides and memorial options all publish without a developer.
What changed
The site went live on 3 March 2026. In the six months since, around 4,700 new users have found it, with organic search the largest channel by a wide margin.
This is not a site that sells anything, so we judge it differently. Success is a family finding the right page in one go, a funeral director booking without picking up the phone, and the office publishing a service notice the same morning it is confirmed. All three now happen without us.
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