How to Create a Proper Memorial Page or Tribute Site
When someone important passes — a mentor, a colleague, a founder of whatever project you were all part of — the instinct is to throw something together quickly. I get it. You want it done. But if you're actually going to remember Aaron Karrer properly, or anyone for that matter, you need to treat this like a real documentation task, not a quick blog post. Here is how the process actually works when you do it right. First, gather the raw material. I learned this the hard way on a tribute site I helped put together for a former team lead at a mid-size tech firm. We started writing the page before we had all our sources. Two weeks later we discovered the dates on his early career were wrong because one of his old friends had confused two different companies he worked at in the late nineties. We had to pull the page down, correct everything, and re-publish. It cost us about three days of work we could have avoided.
The workaround was simple but painful to implement at first: put up a bare-bones draft with a clear disclaimer that it was a living document, then spend a full week collecting biographical data before finalizing anything. Collect dates, job titles, project names, personal anecdotes from at least five different people who knew him, and any public records or old posts he made himself. Save everything in a shared folder with the source cited next to each item. Not "someone told me" — name the person and how they know this. Structure matters more than you would expect. People skim memorial pages. They are not reading it like an obituary. They are looking for specific things: what did this person actually do, what projects did they touch, where can you find their work, and who do you contact if you want to contribute more information. Lead with the practical stuff. Put the emotional material further down the page. For the technical side, I use a static site generator — Jekyll or Hugo, depends on whether I need custom fields. Static sites load fast, they do not break when traffic spikes on anniversary dates, and they are free to host on GitHub Pages or Cloudflare Pages. The downside is that if you are not comfortable with Git, the learning curve is real. A WordPress install works too if you need non-technical people to edit content directly, but you will deal with plugin updates and security patches for years afterward.
One thing most people miss: photograph licensing. If you scan old photos from family members or former colleagues, you need written permission to publish them. I once used a photo without clearing it properly and had to remove the entire section within 48 hours of receiving a takedown request. It was embarrassing and slowed down the whole launch. Get a brief email from whoever owns the photo saying "I authorize use of this image on the Aaron Karrer memorial page." That is it. Keep those emails in your source folder. For the content itself, avoid the trap of turning the person into a legend. Pioneers are usually just people who made a series of good decisions under difficult circumstances. The most useful tribute pages I have seen are the ones that show the actual work — code repositories, published papers, project timelines, old forum posts. The personal stories matter, but the tangible record is what other people will actually reference years from now. If you are compiling this into a downloadable format for distribution — a PDF booklet, a zipped archive of documents and images — use PDF/A for long-term preservation. Standard PDFs degrade. PDF/A embeds all fonts and is designed to remain readable decades later. Compress images to 150 DPI unless someone specifically needs print quality. A full archive for a typical tribute comes out to about 200 to 400 MB depending on how many photos you include.
Get the Full Details
There is a cutoff point where adding more detail stops helping. I find that once a memorial page exceeds about 3,000 words or 20 high-resolution images, engagement drops sharply. People lose interest. Split it into sections with clear navigation. A timeline page, a projects page, a gallery page, and a main overview. Link between them. Nobody wants to scroll through ten minutes of content on a single page. The ongoing maintenance question is real. These pages accumulate broken links, outdated information, and requests from people who want to add their own contributions. Set up a simple contact form or a dedicated email alias. Review submissions monthly. Do not try to make the page perfect — make it accurate and keep it updated. A stale memorial page is worse than an incomplete one. Hosting recommendations depend on your audience. If this is for a professional community, GitHub Pages is fine. If it is for a broader public audience that might not understand why a link goes to a raw repository, use a custom domain with Cloudflare Pages or Netlify. Both handle traffic spikes well and the free tiers cover most small-to-medium tribute sites without issue.
One final thing that catches people off guard: the anniversary effect. Traffic to these pages concentrates heavily around death anniversaries, birthdays, and relevant industry events. Plan for it. If your host has rate limits or your analytics tracking is not set up, you will miss the people who are actually coming to pay their respects during those windows. Set up basic Google Analytics or Plausible before you launch, and configure your host with auto-scaling if you expect more than a few hundred visitors per day during peak periods.
