Although the digital revolution has made it possible to connect with clients like never before, most businesses aren’t using the internet to their full advantage. It’s easy to roll out a cookie-cutter website, but that doesn’t mean your page will attract or engage your target audience.

Making your website stand out isn’t as difficult as you may think. Here we will explore eleven common sense tips for accounting website design.

1. Be Entertaining

Most of your readers are coming to you because they don’t understand accounting concepts and can’t do it alone. A boring block of text filled with accounting jargon will not hold their interest. Consider using fun illustrations to help explain the more complex aspects of accounting, or making comparisons to humorous real-world situations. This will demonstrate your expertise in an entertaining way.

2. Test Everything

Test suites and web analytics are a must for ensuring that your marketing efforts are effective. Be aware that strategies that are successful on your main site may not work for mobile sites, so everything must be tested.

3. Be Flexible

Sometimes you’ve got to be willing to throw your original web design concept out the window and try something new. If an aspect of your website isn’t working, you may find that moving things around, removing certain features, or adding new ones could make a big difference in generating web traffic and in user engagement.

4. Customer Service is a Core Value

If you’re not providing good customer service there’s nothing your website can do to pick up the slack. Follow up on web inquires with 24 business hours. Check for messages every day in case a desperate client is trying to reach you over your website. And get your shipping out on time. Don’t leave your clients waiting for tax documents and organizers. It’s bad enough to keep clients waiting if you haven’t gotten around to their account yet, but it’s far worse to have done the work and then not bothered to ship it. I know you’re busy, especially around tax time, and putting off shipping is a seductively simple way of shaving a few minutes off the clock, but don’t do it. Remember… a job isn’t done until it’s shipped!

5. Keep Visitors Engaged

Encourage visitors to participate by using surveys, asking questions, ore even hosting a Q&A session with one of your senior accountants. And don’t be too disappointed if you receive few comments on your blog itself. By posting a shorthand version of your blog on Twitter and using embeddable comments, you can take social media comments and embed them directly into your website.

6. Understand Your Audience

The key to turning your page’s visitors into paying clients is taking the time to get to know your audience, make sure that they have a good experience, and provide them with the information that they need. Web analytics, test suites, and user engagement will all provide clues about your audience.

7. Quality Content

Is your page’s content useful and helpful? Blog posts and articles should be more than the means for keyword stuffing. If it’s not relevant and informative, it shouldn’t be on your page.

8. Maintain Workflow

Don’t let anything on your site detract from a user’s ability to keep browsing. A video clip, for example, should not freeze up the rest of your page as it loads or plays, and any hyperlinks should open in a new tab so that workflow is never interrupted.

9. Prioritize

Don’t let small hiccups get in the way of actually delivering your products and services. Services like Github can help you prioritize which bugs and website to-dos by importance so that you don’t get distracted from taking care of your clients.

10. Be Consistent

Although small changes are good, there’s no need to constantly re-invent your accounting website design to attract consumers. Being true to yourself and your main message will supply a more loyal following.

11. Be Yourself

It’s OK to glean ideas from competitor sites, but don’t become a clone. Making your CPA website about your firm’s unique personality will yield more success.

by Brian O’Connell

Creating a Website for your CPA/ accounting firm means creating a presence millions of individuals around the world see – and compare to other sites (probably also in the millions) offering the same services. Guess what? You have to create a Website that will make them choose you above all others.

Sounds easy enough? Don’t be so sure. Offering something that attracts visitors, keeps them coming back and eventually turns them into paying clients (this is the whole point of your site, is it not?) is not that easy.

Did you, for instance, intend to blow your own trumpet? Really? If you stack your pages – and in particular your landing page – with content telling visitors how wonderful you are, they will blow mental raspberries (you’ll have to imagine that sound, I can’t spell it) and leave. Sure, you want to promote your services, but informative content is far more effective than shouting; ‘Hey, look at me, I am the super-accountant you always dreamt of’.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but as a rule most prospects don’t really care about you. They don’t even care about the services you provide. All they really care about is how your services are going to benefit them, so concentrate your page copy on the savings and increased profits your services offer rather than the services themselves.

What language are you speaking? Accountant speak, grease ball rep or plain English designed to provide potential clients with solutions and explain how you can assist them? If you throw a lot of mumbo-jumbo at visitors, give them visions of a snake pit or treat them like idiots, you are likely to get that raspberry again – they will certainly not come back or recommend you to others.

I imagine your aim is to get people interested in your accounting services; linger a while, take a look around your site and ultimately interact with you. To achieve this, you should first of all consider who is likely to come to your site and what you would like them to do. This will give you a clear idea of necessary content, overall design and navigation, as well as marketing strategies, using social media, optimizing your site for search engines, and so on.

Already have a site? When did you last refresh its appearance/ update content? That long ago? Seriously, would you eat a loaf of bread you’ve had in the pantry for six months? Come on, your visitors know if they are being served with the same old, stale content – and will take off to find someone offering something fresh.

Generate freshness and interest by having a regularly updated blog and social media pages (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook). Use them to educate potential visitors, arouse interest in your site and get them to interact with you by inviting comments/ questions. Presenting content in your own unique way will make things more personal and result in people immediately thinking of you when they see it.

Keeping visitors interested also means giving them something to do – have them navigate your pages with trigger points and calls to action. Don’t be tempted to go overboard and have them page hopping for nothing, though – make sure they find something relevant with every click, or they will see your site as a waste of precious time.

Are you helping search engines to locate you by using your keywords wisely? Remember, they need to be relevant and crafted well into your pages. Descriptive keywords used to link visitors to related pages also help search engines’ understanding of your site, improve rankings and make finding you easier.

Finally, never sit back and hope for the best – measure your Website. Use Google Analytics to determine who visits you; where they came from; what pages they look at; if/ how they interact, and more. The data this provides will show whether you are providing your visitors with a positive experience – or need to make changes.

Congratulations! You’ve survived tax season.

I’d like to post a little apology on behalf of your clients. After all… you deserve a few apologies, and you’re not going to get them from the people who owe them to you so I’m going to offer them to up instead.

Here we go…

I’m very sorry about the plastic bag full of receipts I brought in. I misunderstood last year when you told me not to bring in a shoe box (but you must admit, a plastic bag is not a shoe box).

I realize there are probably better ways to keep receipts, but the truth is I’m just too lazy. I’m afraid of my smart phone, so mobile apps can’t help me. Heck, my kids still have to show me how to use my camera.

I’d promise to do better next year, but we both know I did that last year and I still showed up with a pile of uncommented receipts this time around. I will probably do it again next year. Besides, you’re much better than I am at figuring out which expenses matter and which ones don’t, anyway.

I would also like to apologize for being so late with my tax information. Please understand that when I did my own taxes back in the day I would get home from work at 6 and frantically fill out my 1040 until I had no choice but to drive like a maniac to the post office and stuff it in the mailbox at some time between 11:55 and 11:59. I figure if I could do that every year a trained professional like yourself should have no trouble doing the same thing in the three days I gave you.

I will promise this much though. Next year I’ll try to get you my pension contributions before 2:30 in the afternoon on filing day.

I’m very sorry I got angry with you when I had trouble figuring out how your portal worked. In my defense you really need to simplify it. It’s no wonder I thought it was broken. How can a regular person like myself be expected to understand your online instructions when they are filled with fancy technical language? In future try to avoid using words like “upload”, “log in” and “right click”.

I’m sorry I wasn’t completely honest with you about my business expenses, but if my wife found out I spent six grand on baseball cards and memorabilia last year she’d… hurt me.

I’m also sorry I lost it when I forgot to get receipt for that expensive piece of equipment I paid out last year. I realize now that it’s not your fault that the IRS is so unreasonable and inflexible about accepting undocumented deductions.

Finally, I’m sorry I was always too busy to answer your phone calls and emails. Funny, isn’t it? If I had just picked up the phone a couple of times I could have spared you hours of last minute work and a whole bunch of gray hairs.

Oh well… what can you do?

by Brian O’Connell

Coming Soon-

Brian talks about firing problem clients.

There are literally thousands of websites on the Internet these days. In order to impress visitors and search engines alike CPA websites need to find a way to stand out from the competition. One cool trick for doing this visually is to pay careful attention to the dimensions of your design. The right dimensions can make a website that much more dazzling. This can reduce your “bounce rate” improving your CPA website’s conversion rate and it’s authority with Google.

Though it may seem minor to you, the way the buttons are presented on your website is actually very important to your visitors. Consider using buttons that stand out and grab the visitor’s attention. Searching the Internet for the right accountant is not the most visually stimulating experience, so your website really needs to look sleek and well designed to hold your visitor’s interest. Using a 3D button on your website will give your visitors a nudge; a little something to be excited about. This will encourage them to explore other areas of your site, making it more likely they will choose to use you for their accounting needs. Just make sure the 3D is done correctly or it can look like an amateur put your website together.

To give your webpage even more depth you should consider using a wrap somewhere on the front page of your site. The wrap should be used for you to show off your skills and to encourage your website visitors to contact you. When using a wrap on other parts of your website it is always good to, if you have one, put the title of your “About Us”, blog or an important service page on the wrap. Make it link to a page with unique content that will be of specific use to your visitors. This is also a great way to draw people to any articles or testimonials you might have on your website.

CPA websites should include headers and footers because these help to make the webpage look more organized. You can even use headers to separate information on your website that you don’t want to have run together. For example, if you have an “About Me” section on your website and it is located above or below another section of your website (perhaps a section where you list all the accounting services you provide) a footer to separate them will make your website easier for your visitors to read and understand.

Designs that provide some perspective to your website are very effective as well. This can help your entire website look three dimensional, which will catch the eyes of your site visitors. The key to a successful layout is to have the various items on your webpage align in a horizontal position. It is important that everything is proportionate to everything else in this particular type of accounting website design.

Another way to give your website depth is to put some elements of each page on top of other elements. This is how you achieve depth if you choose not to have 3D items on your webpage. If the designs on your website are flat, some visitors will get bored and move on. Any objects you choose to put on your webpage can overlap with other parts of the page in order to allow you to continue giving your website depth and encouraging site visitors to interact will all the various aspects of your website.

One of the most popular elements of website design today is shadows. These will also give your website depth and gives you the option of having warped pages and floating elements, both of which will give your website a modern feel. Placing a round shadow under one of your page’s elements can also create a 3D look.

by Andy Himes

Click Here for a Close Look At SkyJE's great infographic describing responsive website design.

The list of Internet-enabled devices is continually growing at an astonishing rate. This would not be a problem for your accounting website design if all of these devices featured screens similar in size. Unfortunately, this is far from being the case.

Screen sizes vary significantly from one device to the next. Laptops, notebooks and tablets; phablets and smart phones (many of which complicate things further by allowing users to instantly switch back and forth between portrait and landscape viewing) all have differently sized screens. This means that potentially every visitor to your site may require your accounting website design to be displayed differently – and things are likely to get worse, as technology is far from being at a stand-still and new devices are hitting the market on an almost daily basis.

This endless stream of new devices and resolutions makes it virtually impossible for web designers/ developers to keep up. Trying to set up a different version of sites to suit every device is just not reasonable. It’s not just impractical (you do, after all, have other things to do), it’s very likely to drive you mad if you try as changing technology will render your work obsolete almost as fast as you can complete it!

This leaves you with two choices:

l You can give up and focus on targeting one or two devices.
l You can make your accounting Website design “responsive”.

While option #1 will certainly save you time, it will also mean you will end up losing out on millions of potential visitors/ clients. But what, I hear you ask, is a “responsive” website?

In a nutshell, the theory behind the concept of responsive websites is that a website should respond to and automatically adjust itself according to visitors’ behavior and environment (platform, screen size and orientation). In other words, it needs to be able to automatically scale down to fit any given device’s screen.

In practice, responsive accounting website design is achieved by combining CSS media queries with flexible grids, layouts, images, and so on.

So how is layout/ image flexibility achieved? In essence, dimensions are not given in pixels, but in percentages.

Take for instance the width of an image. Given in pixels, this width will always remain the same, regardless of the size of screen it is displayed on. An image with a width of 150 pixels would appear huge on an iPhone, for instance, while on a PC screen with a 1600×900 resolution, it would be tiny.

Make the width 100 % instead, and the image will always be displayed at the maximum possible width, regardless of screen dimensions. As far as background images are concerned, care needs to be taken, though. Illustrations, photographs and other types of images that can not be tiled easily, as well as horizontal gradients, are not suitable for flexible layouts, as they can not be scaled properly.

CSS media queries essentially determine where your layout’s modules are displayed on a user’s screen. In responsive accounting website design, these queries need to be used in the proper manner to ensure modules are resized and switched around to ensure they can be displayed properly on the screens of smaller devices.

In the browser of a PC, for example, a website may be displayed with a sidebar on either side of the main content. Responsive design uses media queries that will result, for instance, in one of the sidebars being moved to the bottom of the content if the site is viewed on a tablet. If viewed on the much narrower screen of a smartphone, on the other hand, the same site would be displayed with both sidebars appearing at the bottom of the page.

Another option is to gradually simplify navigation menus and/ or change them to drop-down menus for smaller size screens. Changing fonts/ font sizes as screens decrease in size also allows for easily scaling down text based content.

Responsive accounting Website design is, however, not just about making the site fit varying screen sizes – it is also about giving users a choice of what content they wish to see. Resource-hungry content, for instance, can be hidden when a small screen is detected, providing the user with a link to the content instead. This way, they can decide whether to follow the link and view the content or not.

For a look at a great infographic describing responsive website design check out this image published by skyje.com.

All said and done, a responsive Website is designed to provide the optimal experience for users – regardless of the device they are accessing your site from.

by Erik Thomsen

A Client Portal is fast becoming a necessity for any accounting practice. Whether it’s a big player with 350 staff members or a tiny 3-person outfit, a CPA firm must choose a Portal solution.

The number one reason for this is federal privacy legislation, such as the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999, as well as state laws, both of which are stricter than ever regarding your clients’ financial and personal information. To stay in compliance, accounting firms must ensure that their clients’ data is protected.

Historically, many firms have relied on email to send files back and forth to their clients. But this poses two major problems. First, email is not secure. It’s relatively simple for users on either end to expose their inboxes to other staff; and while email is in transit, it sits unprotected on servers. Second, emailing large attachments, like QuickBooks files, is tedious at best, and impossible at worst.

Client Portals offer a secure environment, with multiple layers of security, where you and your clients can easily exchange documents and files and stay in compliance with the law.

Balancing Security with Ease of Use

The majority of Portals on the market will offer adequate security for your firm. It’s harder, however, to find a Portal that’s easy to use, for you and your clients. If your Portal solution is not user-friendly, then it will likely be ignored in favor of email, thus reintroducing privacy concerns.

So how do you pick the best Portal for your firm?

In this article, I present tips from CPAs using a variety of Portals to point out what works and what doesn’t.

Client Usability

The extent to which your clients feel comfortable using the Portal has a huge impact on the success of the technology for your firm. Simply put, if they don’t use it, then it can’t safeguard their data. It’s important to make sure the software doesn’t turn off any of your clients, because it’s your job to maintain security.

Retrieve Files Quickly

When researching Portals, ask the provider how easy it is for clients to download files you’ve placed in the Portal for them. An effective method is a notification email that alerts the client that a file is waiting for them and includes a link directly to the Portal.

Ideally your client would simply click a link in the notification email and the waiting file would automatically start downloading. However, this poses a major security vulnerability. Unfortunately, to keep the system secure, your clients need to log in before downloading the waiting files.

But the software must still be crystal-clear for your clients, or it will cause headaches for you and for them. Kara Haas, CPA, PA, of Englewood, FL, learned this the hard way: “Before I started using LeapFILE, I tried one product that was downright painful. My two most tech-savvy clients couldn’t remember how to download their files each time,” she notes.

Password Issues

One stumbling block when logging in to the Portal is that it forces the client to remember their password. Some CPAs report that this presents a difficulty. “Most clients do have trouble remembering their passwords,” explains Edward McNeil, CPA, Partner at Ercolini & Company LLP in Boston, who uses CCH’s ProSystem fx.

In addition, the ability to reset passwords for clients can present a problem. Chris Farmand, CPA, CITP, of Jacksonville, FL, says that he’s used a Portal where the username and password is set by the system, and it can’t be changed. Unfortunately, the username is the client’s email address and the password is their Social Security number – which Farmand believes is not secure enough. “It’s completely inexcusable for a Portal provider to set such obvious passwords,” he states.

Firm Usability

Initially you may think that as long as the Portal works for your clients, then it will be successful. However, it’s just as necessary for the Portal to be intuitive for you and your staff. As a service-based business, your time translates into your revenue. You need a Portal that pays for itself  by increasing firm efficiency.

Intuitive Filing System

If files aren’t displayed in a logical way in your Portal, then the time-saving features of the software will quickly be compromised as you scroll through hundreds of files. This is a headache for smaller firms; and for larger firms, who may receive hundreds of files a day during tax season, it can lead to virtual chaos.

DMS Integration

Farmand points out the benefit of a robust document management system (DMS) that works seamlessly with a Portal. He would like to find a DMS that allows him to share permissions with the Portal. This would allow him to simply check a box once to share the file with the client in a read-only format.

Password Strength

Just as it’s important to be able to easily reset the password for your clients, you should look for a Portal that allows you to reset your own password. If there’s ever a security breach – even if you just suspect one – you’ll want to immediately change your password to something more complex.

Training and Support

As with any complicated software, all firms need a certain amount of training and support, for them and for their clients. Be sure to choose a Portal that provides this. Can you get the support you need through phone, email, help files, and tutorial videos? Do you have adequate training information to send to your clients?

McNeil appreciates his provider’s phone support. He says, “CCH has a call center, which we use for all their products. They are usually very helpful.”

When it comes to training clients, CPAs use a variety of methods, from internal videos and screen shots to sharing the materials provided by the Portal provider. “We downloaded the user guide in a PDF format and attach this to the notification that goes out to the client when their portal is set up,” explains Amy Powers, Tax Manager at Grennan Fender Ruta LLLP in Orlando, FL, which uses ProSystem fx.

Remember, for a Portal to keep you in compliance with privacy laws, you – and your clients – must actually use it. When researching Client Portals, look in to client usability, firm usability, and support. Don’t let niggling technical issues prevent you from fully adopting this powerful tool, which helps you exchange personal and financial data safely, and keeps you in compliance with the relevant legislation.

by Brian O’Connell

When people are looking for a CPA they are usually going to assume that finding one will be dull. Prove them wrong. Make your CPA website design visually, intellectually, and emotionally appealing all at the same time.

You want to avoid an overly complicated website. Finding an accountant is overwhelming for many people and you want people to come to your website and see that it is easy to navigate and understand.

It is a good idea to take a minimalistic approach to designing your website. You want your website to come across as serious to potential clients because in your line of work no one will expect to see a website overloaded with graphics, videos and other elements that can become annoying. The less you have on your accounting website, the better. This doesn’t mean having a boring, or even overly simple website. It just means you don’t want one that is too busy. Your site is meant to educate potential clients about the benefits of the accounting services you offer, not so much to entertain them.

The best way to begin your CPA website design is to start with a simple template and then build on it. Do not pick a template that is meant for an entertainment or gaming website. Stick with something designed for accountants.

Keeping it simple means you include all the necessary information, but you spread it out over various pages of your website. Not everyone looking for an accountant is particularly Internet savvy and you will attract more potential clients with a simple website they can easily navigate.

Don’t try to show off with some flashy website because that could easily backfire on you. A website with too much multimedia content can take forever to load and use a large amount of bandwidth. This may turn people off and you’ll lose them to a competitor. If visitors have trouble finding the information they are looking for they will likewise leave.

Make it easy for them to find your contact info, mission statement and whatever else you deem important to the acquisition of new clients.

Designing a website using a minimalist approach can be more difficult than designing a complex website because you have to use less elements to convey more information. CPA website design is a tricky task but one that you can tackle. You want to thrive as an accountant who stands out from your competition, and your website will help you do that.

by Brian O’Connell

Due to constant advancements in technology, mobile marketing has hit something of a plateau far short of it’s potential.

This huge source of potential income will likely remain challenging for CPA and accounting practices for a while. While the internet is saturated with increasing numbers of smartphones, laptops, and tablets, the short message service (“texting” or “SMS”) has limited capabilities and developers are having a very hard time keeping up with this rapidly changing technology.

Although mobile marketing is a convenient tool for most CPAs, truth is, PCs are much better at accessing online applications than smartphones and tablets. Smaller mobile marketing devices have more issues due to ever-changing apps and upgrades. Furthermore, portable devices simply are not designed to accommodate apps such as long forms that can be filled out on a PC. This can have a significant impact on email response forms, and on-site search functions. Often times, the result is slow and unresponsive searches that discourage prospects. This issue has also pretty much crippled many more advanced and specialized interactive functions.

One way to improve these issues are for developers to create a single app that can be optimized through multiple devices, but such an advance would require the various operating systems agree to a set of reliable standards. There are not yet any signs that this is even on their radar. Until then, we are making it a point to use short forms that work on smartphones and tablets, or simply go back to the basics and be contacted by phone.

For now your best solution is to do your best to make your existing website as mobile friendly as possible. The old CPA website design standards; creativity, insight, vigor, and most importantly communication; still apply. A creative website has a greater chance of success, because it is more likely to attract a wider target audience.

Keys to establishing a viable website include:

• Creative websites templates with larger icons for easier recognition to engage users on both mobile and traditional devices
• A thorough insight of the accounting industry to encourage strategic thinking
• Vigor to draw on the visuals and verbal techniques in order to initiate business
• Communication to track the progress of your efforts, and/or close accounting deals in person or via phone if necessary

In essence, even though smartphones and similar mobile devices are growing wildly in use and enable CPA websites to be flexible, accountants are constantly hampered by inaccessible and/or changing operating systems, browsers, and other software apps. Until developers are able to tackle this dilemma Mobile marketing is going to continue to suffer from significant limitations.

Feasible alternatives include utilizing resources like social media, analytical marketing, and coupon planning which incorporate with mobile devices indirectly. Fortunately, sites like Facebook and Twitter allow countless CPAs to flourish in their practice and these services are taking on mobile compatibility issues independently. Along with the ability to survey the market, and offer incentives like discounts through coupons, many accountants have been able to withstand the challenges intrinsic to mobile website design.

Ultimately, until developers can find cost-effective ways to keep up with technology CPAs should align their businesses with popular social media sites and search engines.

It is no secret that today’s accounting industry faces an uphill battle, but if CPAs unite certain facets of their business, chances increase that they will overcome many of the obstacles in front of their mobile website designs.

by Brian O’Connell

CSS is an abbreviation of “Cascading Style Sheets”. It is a style sheet formatting language used to format the look and feel of web pages. CSS mostly applies to web pages that are written in HTML and XHTML although it can be applied to any kind of XML document.

Okay, that’s the Geekspeak definition. Now let’s try to explain it in English.

CSS documents are fundamental to contemporary web design. A cascading style sheet is a document that describes to a visitor’s web browser what a site is supposed to look like before it even starts downloading individual pages.

Typically, web pages have three main layers. These layers are:

The Content Layer
This is your message. The content is whatever the site owner wants to convey or share to site visitors. Text is the most common content on the web as most sites are basically “instructive” but content also includes images, sounds, videos, and downloadable documents.

The Presentation Layer
This is the layer where the presentation of the content which you have is defined. The presentation layer dictates how your website will appear to site visitors as they browse your site.

The Behavior Layer
This is the layer that is concerned with real time interaction of the user and the documents being viewed. The behavior layer is usually handled by JavaScript code and deals with things such as validation of user information, tracking traffic, and user verification using tools like CAPTCHAs.

CSS is mainly concerned with the presentation layer.

CSS is widely recommended in presenting websites because the CSS code is independent of the HTML or XHTML “source code” of the website. This makes styling much easier as far as your accounting website design is concerned because it is much easier to change the feel of your web pages by editing only one CSS file rather than editing say two hundred, a thousand or more HTML documents.

So… Geekspeak aside… what does this mean to you?

Without CSS changes to a site design once it’s coded can be ridiculously expensive; requiring that each page be edited individually. CSS allows us to be much more flexible.

For example, let’s say you find a website template you really love, but the font is Arial and all your marketing materials use a Georgia font. This would normally be a HUGE job. You would need to go to every page and manually change all the calls to the website template’s font to your own. Using CSS we can easily change the font style, size, and/or color by simply changing the style sheet!

There are other benefits of using CSS in your accounting website design. These include:

• Reusable content from services such as text to speech conversion and/ or RSS feeds are made easier with a Cascading Style Sheet due to its being external to the site’s source code.
• A single CSS sheet can control how any web page on the site will be reproduced for different output media. Creating a CSS sheet for each and every page is therefore unnecessary.
• CSS provides a better control over the appearance of a web page/ web pages than presentation elements in HTML files.
• Cascading Style Sheets save bandwidth. The style sheet is cached after the first request. This property enables the style sheet to be reused for each web page in your site. Removing presentational elements from your markup language and instead using a CSS file also reduces the bandwidth consumption.

Of course, most of these benefits don’t matter to you as much as the simple flexibility afforded to you in designing, maintaining, and updating your site. It allows Templates to be easily customized for a lot less money than fully blown old-school design. Combine this with our proprietary Site Manager system and it’s a fairly simple matter to take a template and give it a completely unique look and feel. This is the design benefit of CSS that will most significantly impact your accounting website.

by Andy Himes

Happy New Year!

We all have accounting websites. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t be here. But not all of us have great accounting websites. In a market where everyone has one, having the best website can give you a big leg up against your competitors. The web is changing, like it does every year, in leaps and bounds! Sometimes it can be hard to keep up. Why not take a few hours this New Year to make sure your firm’s website is good enough to outshine the competition?

There’s a lot of talk out there about search engine optimization, and we’re covering it, too. But instead of just asking, “Is your website search engine optimized?” here are some specific questions that will help you make an objective appraisal:

Does your website have the proper keyword density?
Keywords will determine the type of traffic that is driven to your accounting websites. If you have the wrong keywords you will get the wrong people. Each page of your website must have focus and be geared toward the exact aspect of your business that will draw the right clientele.

Are you using the HTML headings in the right way? (H1, H2, H3 etc.)
One of the key ways to tell search engines what your website is all about is by using heading tags in the correct way. The simplest rule is that headings are a ranking classification with H1 being the most important and H6 being the least.

Are your image files too large?
OK… This is more about load time than the filesizes of each image, but this is a great way to control load times and you don’t need to be a web geek to do it. Take a look at your images. Your web browser will let you check the image properties by doing a right click on the image.

Pictures are powerful ways to draw customers to your accounting websites. In this day and age of high definition everything, your pictures do not have to be massive files in order to look good. The speed at which your page loads is more important than how good your images are. Replace, remove, or compress images that are too large.

This can be a particular issue for images you upload yourself. If you uploaded an image off a digital camera without re-sizing it you are probably looking at a file size of 3MB or more. This will cause a substantial increase to your page’s load time.

Use jpg images for most things as it strikes a great balance between image quality and size.

Is your website mobile ready?
By 2015 the majority of internet usage will be done via a mobile device! That means that if your website is not mobile ready it is already beginning to lose potentially valuable traffic. Take a look at your website on a variety of phones and tablets. Make sure that it not only looks good, but that it’s readable and usable.

There is no time like the present to look to the future. With advances in technology and particularly the shift towards mobile usage, it is important to make sure you’re keeping up. What better time than now, with the new year upon us, but the tax crunch still a few weeks away?

by Brian O’Connell