If you’re ready to create a new business website, make sure to design one that’s pleasing to look at, professional, and loaded with content. As part of this effort, remember the often-neglected detail of color, which can have a surprisingly big effect on the overall tone of your site. When you make a poor color choice, you really are in danger of giving a confusing – and unprofessional – message about your accounting business.

Make Your Website Pop with These Background Colors

The benefit of accounting website templates is that they’re easy to individualize with your own style. Your site’s background color is one of the elements that can and should be tweaked when giving your site a personal touch. Why? Because the color of the background immediately conveys your level of expertise and trustworthiness.

When picking a color, remember that every color has a particular meaning in the marketing world. Take a look at this list of the best colors:

• Blue is a good pick for an accounting website’s background as it represents steadiness, professionalism, and seriousness.
• Green symbolizes money and health, which gives the message that you will help a business become healthy and profitable.
• White makes a nice background color for your accounting website because it represents simplicity. Looking for an accountant can be complicated; a clean, simple background color can make it seem less daunting and, therefore, make your firm an attractive choice.
• Lastly, black makes another good pick for your accounting website’s background color. Black also connotes seriousness, like blue, and this gives the clear message that you’re serious about your work and will be a reliable service provider.

Don’t Go Too Light or Too Bright with Text Color

After picking the background color for your site, you need to decide on the color of your website’s words.

Given that your website is meant to showcase your accounting services, your text colors should be clean, crisp, and, above all, readable. Try out a few different combinations of background and text colors available on accounting website templates before making a decision.

The background of most business websites is either white or black. The most popular combination of background and text color is a white background with black text.

If you decide on a black background, you must use brightly colored text – but not too bright, which can blur edges. A medium blue could be the best choice for this background.

The color combination you choose when customizing accounting website templates should enhance readability while also conveying your worth as a service professional. When you’re thoughtful about the color shades to use for your site, you have a much better chance of building an effective website.

If you haven’t taken a close look at your accounting website lately, there’s no better time than now. People are becoming more and more conscious of the design quality of websites. Even small things like images or graphics on your main page may detract from the quality of your website. Like it or not, people do judge CPA websites just as harshly as any other website. You may be the best accountant in the world, but people will never even give you a chance if your accounting website’s design is off. If you’re losing business to the big box accounting firms, your website is likely the number one problem.

Give your website a good thorough evaluation. Put yourself in the shoes of visitors to accounting websites. Consider the reasons they might be visiting your website. Look at your leading competitors’ websites. This will enable you to fix any flaws in your website and make it better than the competition. At the end of the day, you don’t want the appearance or user experience of your website to be the reason you are losing clients. Prospects can be easily scared off by poor quality graphics. What’s more, if your website is difficult to navigate, people might not even take the time to look your website. Accounting websites need to be streamlined and clearly list the accountant’s services.

As you know, most people who search for accounting websites are looking for help with their taxes. Therefore, it is important to make that a prominent feature in your list of services. Make it easy for visitors to your website to tell what exactly you can do for them. People are looking at accounting websites because they want a solution to their financial problem. If you can make their experience on your website efficient and easy, then you will likely land a lot of clients directly through your website.

Page layout is extremely important. You might not think much about how the pages of accounting websites should be laid out, but you really need to provide a good user experience. Keep your text in blocks with plenty of white space surrounding them. Paragraphs should be short. People typically skim on the Internet. If a block of text is too long they may skip over it completely. Images and interactive elements are important on accounting websites. Just remember to keep a nice balance between text and interactive elements. You are going for a clean, professional design. Every element should serve a purpose on your website.

It’s no secret that accounting websites can be powerful marketing tools. Your website is your chance to reach the entire world at any time of the day or night. Because the Internet is so big, you may be tempted exaggerate your skills, services or list of clients. However, remember that it is best to be yourself. Online users can pick up on this kind of thing very easily. It really is better to present yourself as you would in person. Even though you are competing in an online marketplace, you should own your strengths. You have a unique selling point that will separate you from your competitors. Focus on clearly defining your services and providing the best service for your visitors. This will ultimately win out over even the biggest accounting firms.

Every week more business is happening via the web. With younger generations in particular turning to the internet to find their service providers, accounting firms have no choice but to focus on using high quality CPA websites to appeal to the online consumer. Projecting a knowledgeable and credible online image thus has become a highly significant part in keeping ahead of competing service providers. The quality of your website, along with the strength of the brand image it confers, is a very significant component of growing a business in this day and age.

A good accounting website should convey a definitive identity for your practice by avoiding the cookie-cutter feeling of most sites that use a free template. Yet your site must be clear, content-rich and effortless to use, and steer clear of cheap gimmicks which only distract potential clients.

You can maximize your accounting website’s impact by knowing three simple rules.

Make Design a Priority

Unlike the early days of the internet, it doesn’t work anymore just to choose one of a handful of premade templates and fill in the blanks. Take some time to think about the image you want the site to project.

Chances are that competence and professionalism are high on the list of things you want to convey. The snazzy animations, images and layouts of some modern website designs are unlikely to help you with that. An abundance of features can make a site look tacky, while bright colors create the impression of an informal workplace, or simply look garish if the wrong colors are used.

Tailor Your Style

It’s not that you need to keep it drab and dull. But the elements you choose to include in the website should reflect what your business is about. Attention-grabbing features are only useful if they highlight something useful about the service you provide, or some aspect of your company culture that you want your client to know. So don’t include unnecessary features just for show.

Imagine your website as another room in your office. Since CPA websites represent your business to clients who come to you online, it should project the same sort of atmosphere that you aim to create in your physical space. Picture the website design displayed on your office desk. Does it fit in with its surroundings?

Function Over Form

Always remember a website’s fundamental role is to provide a portal for your practice. A straightforward appearance, attractive graphics and aesthetically pleasing background will help to draw visitors’ attention and encourage them to give you a longer look, but ultimately their loyalty all depends on how effectively the site speaks to their need. Your site should be straightforward to comprehend and be easy to navigate. Even the most clever design idea must not forego usability in the name of style.

CPA websites face a big challenge. They must outperform competing sites and engage passersby while also conveying the class, competency and ease of use which will win new customers’ loyalty for you. Making sure that a website adequately reinforces your brand necessitates a clear brand strategy, good design choices and emphasizing on providing a congruent flavorbetween the site and your office.

Websites are becoming increasingly integral to the growth of accounting businesses. Designing CPA websites doesn’t have to be difficult. In fact, if you follow some very basic website design principles, you’ll be well on your way to creating a successful website. Websites for accountants can be effectively employed to bring in new clients and provide valuable resources for existing clients.

There are hundreds of excellent CPA websites on the Internet. You need to think about ways that you can stand out. Do a quick online search for accountants. Evaluate the results. Think about ways that you can improve on the website designs and make your website stand out. Make your website as streamlined as possible. Website viewers need to be able to find out about your accounting business quickly or they may move on to your competitors.

Avoid using large blocks of text, spreadsheets, charts and graphs. Instead, keep your text as simple as possible and tastefully integrate photographs into the design. Make your navigation simple, easy to find and easy to use. Remember, people are visiting your website for information. Provide information and helpful resources in an easy to use format and you’ll instantly separate your website from the competition. Include content that people will want to share with others.

All of your careful planning and designing will be for nothing if pick the wrong company to host your website. All website hosts were not created equal. Each host offers different options. Some will try to sell you a number of features that you don’t need. Select one based on your needs, but also be sure to allow for some growth. One thing to watch out for is features that will impact page load times. Page load time is extremely important. Most people will not wait for a page to load. If a page takes too long, it’s on to the next one. This means you could be losing potential clients.

All of your careful planning and designing will be for nothing if pick the wrong company to host your website. All website hosts were not created equal. Each host offers different options. Some will try to sell you a number of features that you don’t need. Select one based on your needs, but also be sure to allow for some growth. One thing to watch out for is features that will impact page load times. Page load time is extremely important. Most people will not wait for a page to load. If a page takes too long, it’s on to the next one. This means you could be losing potential clients.

Possibly the most important part of your website will be your contact information. Make sure that the information is updated regularly. Position your contact info in prominent place on the website. Interactivity is also an important part of any website. Including a guest book or space for comments is a great way to engage your visitors. However, make sure that if you include an interactive element to your website that you’ll have ample time to respond. If you won’t be able to reply to everyone who interacts on your website, then you’re better off leaving that feature out. People don’t like to feel ignored.

If you build it, they won’t necessarily come. Once your accounting website is completed, you’ll need to promote it. You may have the best website out of all your competitors but it won’t matter if people can’t find it. Be wary of hiring companies that try tell you that they can work miracles. Companies that make big claims often will send out spam to your mailing list and only lose you business in the long run. One simple way to promote your business is to create an opt-in newsletter. Include tips and resources in the newsletter and include a link to your website. People enjoy receiving useful resources from trusted professionals. In the end, you’ll gain a lot more attention to your website and attract new clients.

Do You Know How Much Money
Your Website is Making?

Conversion Tracking is the Key to Making Your
Marketing Dollars Pay Real Dividends

For most businesses tracking website conversions is easy.

Most retail businesses and many services can exploit tracking software like Google Analytics that can count every purchase as it occurs, so when calculating metrics like conversion rates and cost per conversion all you need to do is a little long division. Websites for CPAs, unfortunately, can’t track sales. Traffic tracking calculates sales by counting the number of visits to your “Thank You For Your Payment” page and totaling the online payments. The whole process is pretty much automatic. You can simply divide your total sales by your website expenditures and get instant feedback on your website’s ROI.

This doesn’t work with websites for CPAs. Tracking traffic is useless for calculating ROI unless the sale occurs over the web.

Selling professional services isn’t like selling retail goods. When websites for CPAs lure new clients the lead usually come in over the phone. There’s no way a website can track these types of hits so most high end professional services; doctors, lawyers, architects, etc.; need to find other solutions for calculating ROI.

I’m not saying that there’s no reason to track the traffic on these websites. Analyzing traffic patterns on your website can help you glean a lot of important information about who your visitors are, what they want, and where they’re from, but that’s a post for another day. For purposes of figuring out your conversion costs even the best websites for CPAs can’t provide accurate tracking information in regards to conversions.

The only way accounting firms and other professionals have to calculate their ROI on their websites and other marketing campaigns is to do things the old-fashioned way. Back in the old days we called it “conversion tracking”.

On it’s surface conversion tracking looks easy, but it’s actually very difficult to implement because it usually means breaking bad habits and replacing them with good ones.

I don’t need to tell you that breaking bad habits is hard. Make it clear to your staff that you expect them to to take the new procedures seriously.

Conversion tracking takes place during the sign up phase.

When you first fill out the client’s contact sheet you need to ask, flat out, where the client heard about you and why he decided to call. Add this information directly to the client contact file and record it separately in a notebook specifically for that purpose. Once you have this information determining an websites for CPAs ROI is easy.

Your staff is going to balk. Asking these questions can be awkward and it can be hard to impress on employees the importance of proper conversion tracking. Be patient, but be firm. There can be no mistake that this is now an important part of their jobs.

The vast majority of your clients won’t hesitate to answer these questions, and most of the ones that don’t will have honestly forgotten who or what referred you. A few gentle probes will usually shake something loose.

“Were you referred by a friend? A co-worker? Did you find me on the web?”

This technique has a huge advantage over the automated techniques enjoyed by online retailers. Over time the information you gather is much more useful. By taking advantage of Conversion Tracking you not only determine the effectiveness of websites for CPAs, you can determine the conversion metrics of all your marketing campaigns.

Frequently, the first impression potential clients will form of accounting firms is their online presence. This is an excellent chance to develop solid CPA websites that are visually appealing to visitors. It is also a chance to offer information and details about accounting services the practice offers, and an opportunity to convert visitors into clients. A solid way to do this is to add a blog. Adding a blog can be very beneficial.

Blogging is very important in the modern online world. It allows businesses to showcase their expertise in their fields, and it allows individuals to share their ideas. Creating blogs on CPA websites is a great way to introduce the firm to potential clients, and present the practice as approachable to its current clients. It also establishes subject matter expertise in the field of accounting.

There are several strategies to consider while creating and maintaining professional blogs on CPA websites.

When creating a blog on a firm’s website, the firm is creating content as its own publisher. While it is important to post to an accounting blog often to keep the blog fresh, it is also important to make sure the posts all have something valuable to say first so that readers will not lose interest; a blog is not a place to just sell accounting services. Accountant website blogs should be clear, concise and contain good grammar, while sharing accounting expertise with readers.

The field of accounting is relevant to anyone who pays taxes, so firms should try to set themselves apart from the competition. Accounting blogs should have current information on tax laws and tax filing tips so that readers may educate themselves. When blogs offer something of value, readers will want to come back. A CPA blog should also list what services the firm provides, and offer to provide the answers to any questions readers may have. Creating interactivity on blogs is important. It establishes community and a loyal base of readers.

Accounting practices need to share their blogs with others in their professional networks and in their fields. It is important that they promote their blogs on their CPA websites and print the names on their business cards. The more popular CPA blogs become, the more search engine authority they earn. This drives traffic to the blogs and brings more leads.

A critical part of keeping successful CPA blogs is that the authors should keep current with what interests readers. An excellent strategy is to periodically conduct a survey that asks blog readers what their concerns are. The survey should offer a few topics that might interest readers, and one of the responses should be left open-ended so that readers can suggest something original.

Blogging is a tremendous opportunity to boost search engine rankings for modern CPA websites. Every post that is created is a new opportunity for search engine listing. Writing CPA blogs that draw regular readers is the key. This benefits accounting firms by putting their brands in front of leads while selling their services to their current customers, and presenting the search engines good content to raise their search engine presence.

The first point of contact with potential prospects for most firms these days are professionally designed CPA websites. These sites need to establish a lasting impression of your practice.  A website markets for you behind the scenes and around the clock but it calls for persistence to manage your online content so that it’s always fresh.

You also need prospects to come across your business in the search engines. This means your website should be listed high enough that your practice is visible.

Properly managing CPA websites takes a lot of diligence, and not many accounting professionals or their staffs have the kind of spare time it takes to do the job right. One excellent method to compensate for this lack of time is to work with a student to help you with your online marketing. College students and new webmasters are always looking for opportunities to try out their web marketing skills. Some tips are below to help you work with an intern for your CPA website. They can help you with creating and managing effective online marketing strategies.

Intern Experience

It is a good idea to look for potential candidates who have existing online marketing skills. This includes both search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) experience. It isn’t an impossible task to improve your search engine results. However, it takes a lot of effort and you must be patient. You must consistently generate fresh content for your CPA website. Ask your candidates for samples of their writing. The best candidates will have articles written about accounting and the field of financial management. This way you don’t have to spend time teaching them the fundamentals of your business.

Your current clients see you as a dependable professional. It is equally important to project this to your prospects as well. Your intern does not directly work with your clients. However, their work represents you and your practice directly. You should carefully examine their work and make sure that it is of sufficient quality to represent you online.

Your intern needs only a basic set of math skills to be able to create and monitor performance metrics for your website. An understanding of spreadsheets and basic statistics is all that is needed to measure the effectiveness of the marketing programs over time.

Working with Your Team

You should work with your intern as you work with your permanent office staff. This applies even though your intern may only be a temporary employee. You want to think about how compatible they will be with your permanent staff because they will all be working together. You want to be sure there is seamless communication between the intern and your staff, so that the site content they produce can properly reflect your firm’s image.

Online Effectiveness

Because search engine programs can take several months to produce real, visible results, it is a good idea to let the intern make suggestions on SEO and SEM programs. This is especially true once they start to make valuable contributions to your CPA website. Interns can make substantial contributions to your practice’s bottom line, so it is a good idea to keep all options open.

As soon as the first marketing campaigns come to completion, you may decide to continue working with your student beyond the original scope of the project. Business School students and aspiring webmasters can continue to bring value to your practice’s online success, especially in the competitive atmosphere of CPA websites.

When looking at accounting website templates for the first time it’s easy to get distracted. Many providers will offer you what they think you want to see rather than what your firm really needs. To that end many accounting website template providers will neglect a websites long term marketing appeal and sell an illusion of quick ‘n dirty prospect conversion.

There are a lot of reasons for this. First of all these websites are cheaper to build. Long term marketing requires a number of specialized tools and features that add to an accounting website template’s development costs. Perhaps more important, however, is that promises of short term conversions offer a significant appeal to customers new to the internet.

Unfortunately anyone familiar with internet marketing knows that this is a false promise. Very few of your first time visitors are going to be looking for an accountant. The vast majority of the people visiting your site are looking for information. It won’t matter how flashy your site is or how expertly written your sales copy is if you don’t offer a visitor the information they want the overwhelming majority of your visitors are going to leave without giving your site, your brand, or you a second glance.

There are a lot of reasons not to push too hard for a first visit sale. Dedicated buyers are going to buy whether you push them or not.

Unfortunately the reality is that not many of your visitors are going to be dedicated buyers. Maybe our visitor already has an accountant she likes. Maybe she’s still able to use the short tax forms. This doesn’t mean she’s not a good prospect!

According to market research the average life expectancy of a client/accountant relationship is 6 years. That means statistically speaking just about everyone visiting your site is a long term prospect. Maybe her accountant is at the end of his practice. Maybe he’ll get married and move. Or take a job with a large firm. Any number of things could happen. Even poor folks could need you someday. Income changes. People get married. One day they could start their own business or even just buy property. I’ll never forget the panic I felt the first time I laid eyes on a 1040 long form and knew I needed to fill it out.

The real key to using a website to grow your firm is providing not only the information the visitor wants, but also offering such an overwhelming quantity of high quality content that the visitor will come back again and again. What we’re offering them isn’t just a service page and a contact sheet. We’re offering them a library of financial information. Each visit exposes your brand to them again and again. Long term marketing isn’t about making a sale, it’s about positioning yourself as the natural solution to turn to when the prospect is ready to buy. Down the road it’s a pretty safe bet that everyone will need an accountant, and if your website has been engaging and informing a prospect for months or years when that time comes the odds are you won’t even need to make a sale. The prospect will call you pretty much ready to buy.

So… How can you identify accounting website templates with a long term marketing strategy?

It’s fairly simple really. Look for content.

Financial guides and free-reports are great soft sell tools and are very effective at attracting return traffic. They also offer a great side benefit in that they can help you cross-sell your off season services to your existing clients. Use these articles to showcase ways you can help your clients save money, and position you as the expert that can help you do it. You want your visitors to have easy access to them. Divide them up into categories (Business Owners, Home Owners, Self Employed, etc) and make them searchable to make it easy for visitors to find information of interest to them.

Other great features for luring repeat visits are interactive financial calculators, tax due date pages, downloadable tax forms and publications, and most importantly a high quality email newsletter.

Aggressive old-school marketers will advise you to block this content. They’ll tell you to use it to “trap” email addresses for direct marketing. DON’T DO THIS. As soon as you start demanding contact information you’ll alienate your best prospects. Savvy visitors will know full well that if you won’t give them what they want one of your competitors will.

When looking at accounting website templates keep long term marketing in mind. Look for these features in addition to the standard short term marketing features; services pages, contact forms, driving directions, etc; pretty much all providers offer. Long term marketing will not only bring in more conversions over time, it will also bring in better ones.

Tax Time Is Here! Are You Using Your Website to Optimize Your Firm’s Operations?

Today’s economic backdrop is pretty tight and CPA firms are increasingly making use of experienced designers to produce CPA websites to augment their marketing programs.

What many firms still haven’t realized is that the value of your CPA website goes far beyond simple business promotion, it can also substantially trim your business’ expenses and streamline your labor costs.

Sounds too good to be true? Here are some of the basics:

1. Email Newsletters: Switch from sending traditional newsletters via the postal service to using an email service. We’ll will create and deliver your enewsletter for you, and there are many other vendors that will be happy to do the same! This completely eliminates the costs of printing, postage, and staff costs to label and fill your envelopes. It also allows you to cheaply expand your mailing list to include even remote prospects and this brings even more qualified leads to your website.
2. Tax Forms and Publications: Another great use for your website is distributing tax forms. It’s very labor intensive and expensive to mail tax forms to your clients and over time the cost of the staff time accumulates. These are lost hours for which you cannot bill. Instead, create a document center on your website. This document center can contain tax forms that your clients can download.
3. Tax Organizers: Every tax season mailing your tax organizer becomes a major expense. It consumes staff hours and costs a fortune in printing and postage. This can cost hundreds of dollars, depending upon the size of your client base. Use your CPA website to host a PDF document instead. This way your clients can download it and print it from their homes. Some modern CPA websites, including your basic CPA Site Solutions Silver and Web Tools Packages, have their tax organizers posted as an online form. This can be securely sent online directly via the website. 
4. Online Secure File Transfer: Tax time is an expensive time of year. This is particularly true for postage expenses. As the April 15 deadline approaches, clients sometimes procrastinate sending their documents, which is frustrating for both you and the client. Frequently, you must resort to overnight mail so that you don’t miss deadlines. A CPA website can include a secure file transfer feature, which allows your clients to submit their confidential documents quickly and safely, without the postal service expense.
5. Frequently Asked Questions:A CPA website does much more than just marketing. It can also contribute to business optimization initiatives. During the year, your staff answers a lot of calls that are not billable, which can add up to hundreds of dollars of labor cost. The time loss for these calls isn’t just time spent on the phone, because the calls also need to be documented. Every time one of your staff members is interrupted, even for a moment, it takes them several minutes to adjust and return to task. Of courss let’s not overlook the main benefit of these features. In addition to helping out your customers, they can also attract prospects and website leads…
   • Interactive Financial Calculators can help your clients find answers for themselves.
   • A “Track My Refund” feature can give your clients a reasonably accurate estimation without clogging up a phone line.

While a CPA websites’ most important role in your firm is prospecting, it can also save you money by decreasing your operating overhead and helping you better serve your clients.

Effective communication is a key factor in the success of any accounting firm. It can mean the difference between a hectic and stressful tax season and a smooth and efficient one. Therefore, websites for accountants should be designed with communication in mind. Communications systems can be integrated into websites for accountants to make the entire office communications streamlined. Employees and clients will benefit from a centralized means of communicating throughout the company. The better your communications features are on your website, the better experience you and your clients will have with your company as a whole.

Designing websites for accountants with streamlined communications features may seem like a lengthy and costly project, it will pay off with improved productivity and efficiency throughout your entire company. You may want to implement these changes in the off season when you and your employees have time to adjust to the new methods of communication. Keep in mind that you may need to assist some employees and clients with the new technology. Allowing yourself ample time in the slower months of the year to roll out the new system will allow for a smooth transition.

The New Year means the beginning of a few intense months of work for accountants. Every second counts during tax season and an organized office with streamlined communication is the key to ensuring efficiency. This will allow you to better serve your clients throughout this stressful time of the year.

There are many ways to make the work flow during tax season more efficient in your office. One easy way to accomplish this goal is to set up a website that supports chat between co-workers. It should also facilitate sending and receiving email. These communications features will allow office workers as well as those who telecommute to communicate instantly. An instant messenger chat system will truly speed up the work process within your office because people will free up a lot of wasted time trying to make contact with other co-workers. A simple status message will alert people to when the person they are trying to contact is busy or available. In the meantime the co-worker can focus on other tasks until the other person becomes available.

Another important component of communication is networking. Networking is absolutely essential to any accountant. Therefore, effective websites for accountants must have a networking website on the company network. The networking website will enable employees to network with ease. Accountants need to network with co-workers, clients and other industry contacts. The website should support communication and networking capabilities for those who are away from the office. Employees who work from home or are traveling should be able to access the company network so that they can remotely participate in the work flow of the office.

Another great option for networking is the social networking website, LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a valuable resource for accountants. Encourage every accountant at your firm to set up a profile. This will allow them to send and receive referrals from colleagues and clients. In many cases this will draw in new prospects. An added benefit of LinkedIn is that you can set up a private group for your company within the site. This is ideal for interoffice communication and brainstorming in one central networking site. It will bring employees who work remotely into the discussion as if they were in the same room.

A final element that all websites for accountants with the aim of improving office communication should have is a means of managing clients. Integrating a client relationship management program is an ideal way to organize client information more effectively. Everyone in the office will be able to track client information and feedback. It will also create a centralized place for organizing information such as email addresses, documents, telephone calls and business deals. A comprehensive approach to office communications through websites for accountants will allow accountants to work efficiently throughout the craziest of tax seasons.