Jølstad is not a single funeral bureau. It is a group of them, plus an inheritance service and an international repatriation arm, each needing its own brand and domain. INFIGO took one funeral-bureau design and turned it into a platform that runs the whole group: two WordPress multisites, several standalone sites, two languages, one set of conventions.
01 · The context
A group, not a single site
Every bureau in the group wants its own name, colours and domain, and none of them wants to pay to build a website from scratch. On top of that sit two service brands - inheritance help and international repatriation - that share the group’s DNA but speak to entirely different audiences. The job was never one site. It was a system that makes the next site cheap.
02 · The build
One design, cloned properly
The whole thing runs on a custom WordPress theme with an ACF flexible-content page builder underneath, so every page is assembled from a shared set of content modules rather than hand-coded. That is what makes it cloneable: clone the design, recolour it, map a domain, and the next brand in the group is online as content work. How that plays out per site - the flagship, the inheritance arm, the international arm, the standalone bureaus - is the walkthrough below.
03 · The funeral-specific parts
More than a brochure
A funeral group needs things an off-the-shelf theme does not have. We built custom post types for memorial and obituary pages, for live-streamed ceremonies with the consent and privacy handling that requires, for staff and for branch offices with their own city directory, plus funeral-cost pricing pages. The domain logic lives in the platform, so every site in the group inherits it.
04 · Two languages, kept honest
Multilingual without the mess
Both multisites run Norwegian and English side by side. To keep cross-language SEO correct across that many pages, we wrote our own import and export tool for hreflang tags, managed from a spreadsheet rather than page by page. Translations stay in the CMS, and search engines are told exactly which page maps to which.
05 · The long haul
Built, maintained, monitored
The platform started in 2022 and is still actively worked. Recent effort includes migrating the group’s faceted search onto Algolia, and the whole estate is watched by our own monitoring so a broken site is something we see before the client does. Same hands, year one to year five.
This is one half of a longer relationship with Jølstad. The other is the funeral-planning application behind planlegg.jolstad.no.
What we delivered
- One funeral-bureau design turned into a platform: two WordPress multisites and several standalone sites.
- A custom theme with an ACF flexible-content builder, cloned and recoloured per brand.
- Funeral-specific content types: memorial and obituary pages, live-streamed ceremonies with consent handling, staff and branch directories, funeral-cost pages.
- Norwegian and English on both multisites, with our own hreflang import and export tool.
- Faceted search migrated to Algolia, monitoring across the estate, and maintenance since 2022.
