Peter Brock Tributes - Hopefully Helping to Ease the Pain

With the unexpected death of two high profile Australian Icons this week, Steve Irwin and Peter Brock, I have been suprised at the amount of traffic that the Obits site has received. Each day surpasses the next.

The nation is in shock, still recovering from one death, to be faced with yet another. I'm not sure whether Peter and Steve shared many common friends, but it must be a sad week for them.

On the Obits site I have been wanting to integrate a "condolence" section attached to each notice. We are planning on introducing a "Memorial" product - an extended version of the current notice. The memorials will be up to 3 pages, with more photos and text, and customised layout. The condolence section is to be incorporated with that launch, so there hasn't been much point developing it on its own.

However, it has occurred to me that there are a lot of people hurting out there, who might just feel a little better being able to publicly announce their pain.

So I have fashioned a tribute page attached to the main notices for each of Steve Irwin and Peter Brock's notices. It's a bit cumbersome in that I have to edit this page with every message that is left, but I'm able to cut and paste so it's not too bad.

Within 2 hours of putting up the tribute pages (which was done on Saturday evening), we've received over 20 messages of condolence - which has surprised me. I wish I'd thought of it sooner, as we've had close to 10,000 views of the 2 notices combined, so I'm sure there would have been many, many more.

Oh it's been a busy week.