Brown and Powers Funeral Home

The first Brown and Powers Funeral Home location has served the Canisteo, NY community since 1963. After expanding into Hornell, NY in 1981 and Angelica, NY in 1999, they decided to expand their reach to the web in 2003 with the launch of brownandpowersfuneralhomes.com – a site developed for them in classic Active Server Pages (ASP) by a third party firm. Intended as a place to share information about the business and its three locations; post obituaries; and enable friends and family of the deceased to share “remembrances” about those who had passed on, the new site made them unique among others in their profession.

Unfortunately, Brown and Powers were notified in late May 2009 that their website would be going offline; the firm who had built and was maintaining their site would be closing its doors and ceasing operations at the end of June 2009. Although the firm agreed to provide the funeral home with a database snapshot containing the hundreds of obituaries and thousands of remembrances that had accumulated through the years, the firm refused to provide the funeral home with the site software itself. With only a month remaining before they faced the loss of their online presence, Brown and Powers needed a plan and RedBottle Design was there to provide it.

Using only the poorly-structured database snapshot provided by the old firm and limited access to the existing website, RedBottle was able to build an entirely new site on top of version six of the Drupal Content Management System (CMS). RedBottle re-implemented nearly 100 percent of the functionality of the old site while refining some aspects that made the original site clunky and hard to use. Since the timeframe did not leave much room for graphic design, RedBottle was able to re-use, and in some cases even improve, many of the graphical assets from the original site, giving it a fresh look in the process. RedBottle completed the re-built version of the Brown and Powers website, complete with data from the old site, on July 20th, 2009.

Since 2009, RedBottle has continued to evolve its service offerings to provide Brown and Powers with even more services to meet their needs. Most notably, Brown and Powers became the first merchant to take advantage of RedBottle’s status as a reseller of Authorize.net Credit Card processing services.