For today’s topic, we would like to answer a common question we receive from people who are interested in trying our service but have not yet signed up for one of our CPA and accounting web sites.

The most common question, happens to also be the easiest to answer, and that is “how long does it take to get my website up and running?” You might be surprised to learn that it only takes a few hours to have your account built and web site ready for your customizations.

We do recommend our customers customize their site to personalize it to their business and services, but your website will come fully loaded and ready to go right out the door. In fact your web site can be live within 24 to 48 hours, if you so choose.

Within hours you can have a web site built, hosted and ready to go. Your site will have all of our ready to go content including pre-built service pages and firm profile, all the financial guides, all the calculators, a loaded tax center with tax forms and publications, tax rate tables, refund tracking and more, the email marketing system and monthly newsletter created and emailed for you, the secure client portal including secure file exchange, online tax organizer and site manager, and so much more.

Best of all, we have made getting started easy. Simply visit our get started page and supply us with your contact information, and one of our representatives will call you typically within a few business hours, to get some basic information from you, such as your business address, what site design you like and your company logo if you have one.

From that call, and usually in the same business day, you will receive a link from us that will contain your fully loaded accounting web site. With our no commitment, 60 day free trial, and absolutely thrilled guarantee, why not get started today?

Here at CPA Site Solutions we get requests to customize our website designs all of the time. All of them are fun to do and offer some great visual enhancements to any website.

We thought it would be fun to share some of these custom designs with you and offer a perspective on why these work so well. This week we will be taking a look at Robertson, Woodford and Summers website.

The website is based upon website design template 212. Although, like all of our web site templates, 212 is dashing there are things that can be done to any design to really personalize and help solidify a firm’s branding online.

The changes we made to this template design were both within the flash introduction and the header images. Lets take a look at the Flash Introduction of the template. As with any Flash introduction the images used are a key element in providing the most visual impact.

When looking at making changes to the main Flash image it is good to have a good batch of visually appealing photos. The appeal of this template photo comes from the angle the shot is taken from.

The way to narrow down what photo to use is how appealing it will be for those that are local to your firm’s area. The picture of this bridge is near to this firm’s office.

There is a great appeal to images that people will recognize. Having this bridge in place is not only a striking image but will make people like what they see.

This makes them even more receptive to the content within the accountants website.

The next part that was changed within this template design was the header image. The image used within the template is an extension of the main Flash introduction. This header image serves to reinforce what the user had seen initially.

This creates continuity within the design. Although having this continuity is key you can break from it somewhat. In the case of the customized header image that Robertson, Woodford and Summers website uses, the continuity comes from having another familiar image.

By making these two simple changes there is a lot added to the overall impression of this firms website. That is because these images dominate both what a person sees at the outset and also at the top of every page.

There are a lot of different custom design changes that can be made to our website templates for any accountants website. Changing the Flash introduction and the image that shows in the header area are some of the more popular changes made to a template.

The amount of presentation power within both these areas means that there is a fair amount of impact. The minimal cost involved with these changes make it a rewarding investment.

Considering one for your own accounting firms website? Unsure about what could be possible? Give us a call at 800-896-4500 or email support@cpasitesolutions.com and one of our designers will be happy to help.

At the very basic level Twitter is a social platform that allows those that use it to update what they are doing.  Anyone can do this with a cell phone only guide is that each “tweet” or posting is limited to 140 characters.

Twitter is being used by a lot of people to communicate and the information they send out can help your accounting firm. Now is the time to get involved. Join the ongoing Twitter conversations and help shape the outcome of your online image.

To understand Twitter, let’s take a quick bird’s eye view and look at what Scientific American says.  They write, “reporters including those at ScientificAmerican.com use Twitter as a dedicated newsfeed to keep up with the competition…We also use Twitter to keep up with our readers, and to solicit ideas from them”. It is also used to report earthquakes and other disasters one of the more famous examples was flight 1549 that crashed in the Hudson that was tweeted by Janis Krum.

A blogger had good suggestions on the best ways to use Twitter such as sourcing from your friends about a good website designer,asking them for the best digital camera to buy. What this demonstrates is that people are using Twitter to source their friends in order to make more informed choices.

This form of “friend sourcing” saves people a lot of time and leverages some of what their friends know. If they are asking their friends about a good accountant to use, wouldn’t you want them to answer with your firm? How can you get this to happen?

One way is to join the ongoing Twitter conversation. By using Twitter, along with a blog and your website, you can help broaden your online platform and help shape your accounting firm’s online image and branding.

How could using Twitter work? Well once you create an account then the next task is getting people to follow what you read. That is where having a blog and an accountants website come in handy because you can link to Twitter from either of those areas.

Having information that people can use, like the type you might use in your blog, helps gain you more followers. For example, let’s say there is a new tax law that affects the clients that are with your accounting firm. You can post this on your blog with helpful information and a shorter post on Twitter with a link.

The people who are following your blog and Twitter will appreciate the information. As they tell their friends, more people will follow you on Twitter. The more people come to trust your information and your firm the more likely they are to mention you when the time is right.

Consider Twitter as not just another social platform but as a way to communicate to a group of followers. This group can help leverage credibility that can be used later to influence potential clients.

Basically, Twitter opens the potential to have your accounting firm talked about and kept in the minds of your clients and their friends.

It may just be time to take a closer look on how you can use Twitter as a tool for your firm’s image. If you are interested in how CPASiteSolutions is using this communications tool, please follow us on Twitter.

Here at CPA Site Solutions we recently made blogs available. This means that any accountant can have a blog on their firm’s website. Although we went over some strategies and benefits, a blog is an ongoing task.

This means that we need to find material that will work with our audience on a continual basis. In other words we have to keep asking ourselves, what can we write about? This may sometimes seem like a daunting task.

Once you build a few places to reference for inspiration, it becomes much easier. One of the easier ways to build some references is to look at what other accountants are blogging about.

This doesn’t mean that you have to copy what these other blogs are writing about. What it does is give you ideas, a spark to your own creative process. (To make it easier to get an idea of what this means lets take a look at a couple of blogs.)

Some accounting blogs will write about what they do in terms of advice in a straight forward manner. If you work with helping clients start a new business you might offer some general advice on the topic.

This type of advice, although given freely on your blog, actually serves as bait for those needing more specific information. As you get your site in front of more people then this bait can gradually lead to people coming to your door.

You can also take a look at what is happening in the news for the week. These economic times offer all kinds of need for help or advice. Take some news on how US Small business funding is getting drier. What kind of advice could offer those starting a small business with this in mind?

There are other accounting blogs that will have fun with everyday photos. Consider this one that weaves in what is happening in their life with accounting advice. This can offer both an inviting perspective as well as practical information.

The more that your clients know you and what you do alongside the practical information that you offer to them, the easier it is to include you in conversations. The conversation a client might share with a friend might be about the recent fish he saw you catch on your blog.

That same friend might actually just happen to be looking for an accountant. Your blog then will have indirectly translated in a possible new client by being referred to in a conversation that might not have otherwise taken place had it not been for your blog.

More often though what you write about will help your accounting firm build a solid reputation on the internet. In the end the small amount of time you spend looking at the news and other blogs, will translate into great ideas you can use.

Anyone with an accountants website hosted by CPA Site Solutions is familiar with our Site Manager. This common tool is used to change pictures and text on any accounting firm’s website with us.

Although it doesn’t take long to get up and running with using the Site Manager, there are some tips and tricks that can make some tasks more efficient. These are just the more common tips and tricks, there are many more that we may follow-up with in another post. Enjoy and let us know any comments you have on these or some tricks you use often!

• Copying and Pasting. If you copy and paste from word or another website then you will need to use the copy from word icon.  If you don’t there will be some less than desirable results the worst being that particular page will show an error message instead of the page itself.
• Image Properties. While your in the site editor if you right click on an image and choose properties:



• You can then choose how you want to have the text to wrap around the image. You can also increase the space between the image and the text.



• Using tables to format paragraphs. If your not getting the display results from the text you would like try using tables.



• This can make it easier to make blocks of text and images work just the way you want. Here is a before:



• Then here is after making this into columns. This is great to do with images as well as text:



• Use Shift + Enter. If your having trouble getting the editor to take a single space you can use Shift + Enter to get it to work for you.

As part of your firm’s website with CPA Site Solutions you have access to one of the most powerful web mail solutions. Over time any email solution becomes cluttered and needs to be organized.

As an accountant organization is an important part of the job and our Workteam Collaboration Suite makes it quick and easy via the label system. Here is a quick and easy way to access and use labels.

When you login to your web mail you will notice a tab on the left hand side that says “Labels” and it starts out empty, but that’s easy to change! Just head over to the top right of your screen and look for the Settings button.  Once inside you will be presented with a few tabs and you are looking for the third one, the ones that reads “Labels.”

From here you can create many new labels to help organize your email. Once you have setup your first test label, go back to your in box and you will notice that the label list now has your new label in it.

There are a few ways to use it:

• You can place a check in the box next to any number of emails. Now click on the drop down  that says “Labels” and apply the appropriate names for your labels.
• The second method is to place a check in the boxes next to the emails.  This time you can grab the area to the left of the check marks  and drag it over to the appropriate label.

Now, here’s the fun part. You can find any email based on their label simply by clicking on the label on the right hand side of the screen.

So for example when you get emails from different clients you can label those emails with their name. This will organize all those emails making it that much easier to retrieve past communications when you need them for reference.

You could have a particular campaign that you are doing and want to organize responses. You could also have a business development and want to keep track of communications based on the different stages.

Although labels can sometimes take some getting used to using at first, there are a lot of uses for them. The key is to keep at it to make it a regular habit. Once you do start, you wonder how you ever lived without them as it makes organizing your email and finding anything you need that much easier.

One small disclaimer for labels is that they won’t work unless you have a relatively current browser. This means you should have at least Internet Explorer 7, Firefox 3, Google Chrome, or Safari 3.

A lot of times you may want to communicate with someone in your accounting firm but know they are busy on a website project or you are busy and just need a quick confirming detail. You could send an email but lets say you need the information sooner.

Normally this would be a situation where you might pick up the phone or walk over to the person’s desk. This option though can create an interruption both in your and the other person’s work flow. Wouldn’t it be great if there were a way to get the information quickly but without that drawback?

There is a way of doing all of this by using Instant Messenger or what some people call Live Chat. Instant Messenger provides a way to relay a message without the drawback of a phone call or walk over. It does this by allowing the person to answer it in the moment but at their own pace.

Think of getting a phone call, you have to stop what your doing and answer the message right then. The same goes for a walk over, it is an interruption that requires immediate attention.

Instant Messenger on the other hand, can be answered soon but also allows the person to complete a thought. They can incorporate the question into their own in the moment work flow. This allows the brain the shift gears in another direction without having to fully stop.

Answers can be answered and the person can get right back on track with what they were doing. If chat is used this way, for quick answers to in the moment questions, it can actually serve to increase efficiency.

If you have never used Instant Messenger you can be surprised on how it can be made as an efficient tool for your accounting firm. If you have our Workteam Collaboration Suite then you already have instant messenger and can start using it today.

If you have your own or our older email solution then you may not have Instant Messenger. If your in doubt or would like to switch, then give us a call at 800-896-4500 or email support@cpasitesolutions.com and one of our website account managers will be happy to assist.

Take a new look at Instant Messenger, we think that you will be pleased by some of the potentials that it can offer your accounting firm.

In our previous post entitled Picking a Site Design we mentioned a little about using your accountant firms logo with your website. Lets take a closer look at what is possible when a logo is incorporated within an accounting firms website design.

An accounting firms logo can be key to what sort of message or character is conveyed when a person visits their website. Although an accounting firm may decide upon changing to any number of website designs and templates that we have here at CPA Site Solutions, the logo is something that remains consistent.

Given this it is good to take into consideration how your current accounting firm’s logo works with any site style you either currently have or are considering. There are color, size, and image considerations in terms of how it meshes together.

Lets take a look at a current client’s website and how they have used their logo and customized within their website design. The original website template is 377250. This style relies upon the logo as it is slightly larger than the actual image within the header.

Most other styles will have the header image as the foremost part of the display. Having it the opposite within this style makes it necessary to have a strong logo.

What the firm at h-co.pro had was not only a strong logo but they extended it by taking advantage of customizing the image area. The result of this makes for a great display as it maximizes both the logo and image area.

Although this can be done within any other site style, incorporating an area landscape photo can be just as effective and also gives a sense of recognition to those who use the accounting firms services. The cost of doing this is fairly minimal starting at $195 to put a custom image that you already own within the header area. (Small Disclaimer: this site had more customizations done to it such as changing the site style colors)

Regardless of what you do this may not work with a site style if the logo doesn’t already blend nicely. If a logo doesn’t work with the site style you could change your logo but that is not usually an option that most want to take.

Instead of changing the logo to fit the site style why not change the site style to fit your logo? In terms of customizations this is an easy enough and one of the least costly options. The impact, on the other hand, can be significant.

Consider the following website design style 203. Although this can work well with many different logos there are some that might not. If your accounting firms logo doesn’t work with a particular website style then there are some customizations that can be to make it blend nicely.

In order to give you some idea of the possibilities take a look at the following from an accountants website that we did a customization upon. What was done in this case was to take that same site style and change the site colors.

This small change, along with a custom image within the header, resulted in a much more cohesive website design and overall branding of the accounting firms website. (Small disclaimer: more customizations may have been done with this site)

As you have seen there are some things you can do when looking at site styles and your logo. Although there are many site styles that may work right off you might consider customizing either the overall website template colors or the header image.

The results of making the website style work with your logo can have a huge impact with little time or cost involved. If you are on the fence about what to do pick up the phone and give one of our website designers a call. We will be happy to talk with you about possible solutions or customizations.

We have developed a new technique that enables us to better optimize website ads for CPA and Accounting Firms in Google.

This technique lowers your search engine advertising costs and improves the quality of the prospective clients viewing your site.

We’ve already implemented this technique for all our platinum level customers.

If you’re interested in Search Engine Marketing then please call and ask for Norm at extension 100.

Flash introductions on a website have a great following of people who love them.  However there are a lot of people who really don’t like them. Since we offer Flash introductions as part of our CPA Websites, we thought we would take a moment to dispel some of the concerns over their usage.

1. Flash introductions require updates. This one couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact it has been shown that over 99% of users have flash are able to play most animations without difficulty.

2. Flash is slow and takes too long to load. This can depend upon the Flash file. All of the Flash introductions for our websites for accountants are designed to load fast by having small file sizes without sacrificing the quality of the images.

3. Search engines respond poorly to flash resulting in less than optimal results in terms of marketing your accounting firm web site. While this can be true, we actually have techniques that allow us to bypass this limitation so your places well on search engines despite the flash introductions.

4. Many people skip the Flash introduction because they just want to get to information on the accountant’s website. While this can be true for some, there are also many people who find the Flash introduction makes a strong and positive first impression.

These are some of the common concerns with Flash introductions on a website. Those concerns aside, we’d like to show you how Flash can benefit your firm. The best way to do this is to show you some of the more popular Flash introductions offered to any accountant website.

This first one is Website Design #854256. The use of Flash on this Site Design is disarmingly simple yet provides quite an impact in terms of what it offers any accountant web site. The benefit to this site is that it provides a dynamic rotating image that you can customize to make your website more firm specific.

This is ideal for any sort of customization because instead of having one local picture in place you get a series of them.

Another great site style is Website Design #463262. This is a classic example of what flash does best in terms of presentation. This introduction takes a great image with some of the main links to the accountant website and a logo to create an improved first impression for anyone visiting the accountant firms website.

This can also be customized with great results for the small investment involved. Instead of the tree image, imagine using one of your own local landscape pictures or office pictures.

Whatever you think of Flash you might want to take a second look. Give us a call at and one of our website designers can give you an idea of what is possible.

Here at CPA Site Solutions we are happy to make any sort of changes you would like to your firms web site. Let us know what sort of improvements you would like to see for your accountant firms website and we will be happy to see what we can do for you.