A funeral director’s eye, without the funeral director’s diary.

I’m Andrew Crymble, a third-generation funeral director with more than 25 years in the trade. Most of that time I spent on the front line, sitting with families in the worst week of their lives.

I’ve had to step back from running funerals day to day. My wife Nicola is 43 and has FATWO, one of the rarest cancers in the world. Around 150 women have ever been recorded with it, there are about three new cases a year, and there are no clinical trials and no proven treatment. She was a classroom assistant, the job she always wanted, and she can’t do it now. Our children need us both.

So I’ve built a working life I can run from home, alongside her care, and that will still be worth something to my family when this is behind us. Cortege Digital is that work.

It isn’t a sideways move. The funeral industry is the only industry I’ve ever wanted to understand, and building websites for independent firms keeps me in it, working with people who do what I did.

What I know is how a family behaves in the first hour. They search on a phone. They read a name and a number and want to know whether this is the firm that will look after them. They don’t read the whole site; they look for the one thing that tells you you’re the right kind of person. Very few funeral home websites are built with that hour in mind, because the people who build websites mostly haven’t sat in it.

That’s the whole of what Cortege does. I check what a family actually meets when they arrive, show you what I found, and fix it. And if the check finds nothing, I’ll tell you that too.