This month, we’ve added three new features to your Site Manager to make it faster and easier for you to make changes to your site.

Customizable Header Images

It’s now a snap to swap out the stock photography image on the page header to something that reflects you and your firm. Click on a page in your Site Map, and click on the header at the top of the page. A box like the one at the right will open. Select Custom Image from the Header Style drop-down and select or upload the new image.
Page Settings Tab

The new Page Settings tab, found on the far left of each page in the Site Manager, eliminates the need to back out to the Site Map to change page titles or header images.  This allows you to easily alter the page titles that appear in your navigation bar.

Upload Files Button

It’s always been easy to upload image files to include in your website. From any page within the Site Manger, just click on the More Options link at the top of your screen, and select Upload Files. Click on the Files folder on the left, and upload your file. This works with PDFs, .DOCs, and almost any other file type you can cook up.

Looking for a way to make tax season simpler? Our Tax Organizer just got its annual makeover and is ready for the 2011 tax season.

This next-generation Tax Organizer is a dynamic web application that allows your clients to organize their tax information online, saving you time when preparing their taxes. You and your clients can securely access your client’s tax information anytime from anywhere, eliminating the time and expense involved in mailing paper organizers.

As always, the fully customizable Organizer offers you a secure way to catalogue your clients’ documentation and returns from year-to-year. Encouraging your clients to use the Tax Organizer can save you both the hassle of driving around town to deliver paperwork, and saves you the hassle of having to manually enter their information into your tax software.

Interested in learning more about the Tax Organizer? Click here to watch a video.

Looking for a really quick and easy way to get more people to visit your CPA website? If so, then you might want to try the new social media sharing feature we’ve just rolled out here at CPA Site Solutions. It’s just one of the many new time saving features we’ve added recently.

Social Media Share Buttons make it easy for people to “share” informative articles they’ve read on your CPA website with their friends, acquaintances, and business colleagues on social media sites.  And, once it’s shared on a social media site like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, then all of their followers see it too, which means there’s an increased probability of more people visiting your website.

There’s also a “Share Button” for Google Buzz–a social networking tool from Google that is built into Gmail that allows you to share photos, videos and links with people that you email and chat with on a regular basis–and Delicious. Delicious (formerly Del.icio.us), one of the most popular social bookmarking services on the web  enables users to share and store web bookmarks.

How it Works

At the bottom of every article in the Financial Guides section on your website is a “Share This Guide” button. If your visitors want to share an article about retirement planning on Twitter for example, all they have to do is click on the Twitter icon.

Not only do social media buttons allow your site visitors to share useful information they find on your CPA website, a recent study has shown that on average, email messages with social media share buttons generate a 30% higher click-through rate.

What are you waiting for?

Contact the one of our dedicated webmasters at 1-800-896-4500 and start getting more people looking for accounting services to visit your website today!

With our new Site Manager File Upload feature, it’s now easier and faster than ever for accounting firms to upload PDFs, images, spreadsheets, and other files directly to their CPA websites.

This is really good news, because as we all know, busy season is fast approaching and anything that makes your life easier during this hectic time is always a good thing!

It used to be that when you needed to upload files such as PDFs, excel spreadsheets, images, or even word documents to your CPA website, you had to send the files to one of our tech support staff to do it for you. Or, you had to figure out how to use FTP.

Now, you can do it yourself with the click of a button.

That’s right. No more waiting around until someone else does it for you. And no more dealing with the hassle of uploading and downloading files to their correct folders using the FTP server.

Here’s how it works:

1. Log in to your “Site Manager”

2. Locate the “More Options” link at the top of the page and click on it.

3. Next, click on the “Upload Files” button.

4. This will take you to another screen. On the left you’ll see several folders. Choose the “Images” folder if you want to upload a photo. For all other files, choose “Files”.

5. Clicking on either of these will take you to a new screen. Click on “Upload”  and use the “Browse” function to locate the image or document on your computer. Finish by clicking on “Upload Selected File”.

Why Not Give it a Try today?

The Site Manager File Upload feature will not only simplify your workload during busy season, but all year round too.

If you have any questions about the Site Manager File Upload feature, please call a dedicated webmaster at 1-800-896-4500, or email us at support@cpasitesolutions.com.

Do you need a CPA website? Sign up now and get a 2-month risk-free trial.

Social Media. Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn can be great marketing tools for your firm, if you’ve got time to maintain them.

Creating accounts on the top three social media platforms is a great first step, but unless you are consistently reaching out to your clients, those accounts won’t provide much value to your firm.

That’s why it’s important to have a social media posting strategy that is automatic – requiring absolutely none of your time.

The Social Media Marketing System automatically posts helpful tax and financial tips to your Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn account each week. The more information that’s posted in your accounts, the more followers and friends you’ll have, strengthening your social media presence on the web.

Chances are you have clients you only see at tax time, which is when you have the least amount of time to devote to strengthening your relationship with them. Maintaining a social media presence helps you stay in the forefront of your clients’ mind throughout the year, so if your clients need an accountant for something other than taxes, they turn to you.

This new offering is included in the Platinum service level. If you’re currently a Platinum client and you want o take advantage of this service, or to upgrade your Silver or Gold package to Platinum, give us a call at 1-800-896-4500.

We hear the feedback. We hear it repeated over and over again. It’s important to you to be able to securely exchange files with your clients all year round – and critically important during tax season.

The demand on the Client Portal at the end of tax season this year far exceeded our expectations and our over-worked servers couldn’t keep up with increased workload.

So we revamped the Client Portal Server infrastructure to quickly scale up to meet the extremely high demand of tax season.

The new Portal server infrastructure utilizes state-of-the-art fault-tolerant load balancing. So when demand is high more servers are quickly brought online to handle the workload. Then after tax season when demand falls the load balancer allows us to take a few servers offline so we can keep your costs down.

We’ve also worked on the software to increase speed and reliability with absolutely no sacrifice to the security you’ve come to expect from the Client Portal. Your files are still protected by 14 layers of security. Including “all time” file encryption to keep your data safe during transfer, storage on the server and in backups.

Brian O'Connell, President

If you don’t have one yet, you likely will soon.

And even if you resist this high-tech tool, many of your clients and potential clients are proud owners and are using them to access your CPA website.

I’m talking about smartphones.

More and more people are using these gadgets to not only make phone calls, but also surf the Web with ease. In fact, Nielsen predicts that by the end of 2011, more people will own smartphones than feature phones.

Both prospects and current clients are looking up your website on their mobile devices right now.

It’s time to make sure your content-heavy site doesn’t turn them away.

Introducing the Mobile-Friendly Home Page

Here are the problems with traditional sites accessed on smartphones:

• they load slowly because of large graphical elements
• they appear tiny; the user has to magnify them
• readers have to scroll both vertically and horizontally to find the click buttons and read the text
• they’re difficult to navigate since folks are using fingers to click

Each of these problems creates a roadblock for the user, making it less likely they’ll get the information they need (and more likely they’ll find it on a competitor’s site).

But you don’t have to make your entire site mobile-friendly. After all, folks searching for you on the go just need your name, your phone number, and directions to your office.

To address this, we developed a new feature that automatically detects mobile phone devices and delivers a clean, easy-to-read page. Check it out…

Here's how the Mobile-Friendly Home Page appears on different smartphones.

The buttons read:

View Full Site – users click this to be routed to your main site

Driving Directions – when folks click the arrow, they get a link that provides step-by-step directions to your office using Google maps

Email – with your contact email address

Call Us Today – with a link that dials your phone number

How to Get It

Silver clients, add the page called “Mobile Phone Friendly Home Page” to your site. See this Help file to learn how to Add a Page.

Gold clients, just give us a call (1-800-896-4500) or send us an email (support@cpasitesolutions.com) and we’ll add it for you.

To change the Description of your site under “View Full Site,” you just need to adjust the text in your Site Manager.

Silver clients, visit the Site Manager and click on Site Map. Then right click on your home page and select Page Settings. Then simply modify the Page Description under the Seach Engines tab. Here’s what it is by default: “Smith and Company CPAs, PLLC is a full service tax, accounting and business consulting firm located in Poughkeepsie, NY.”

Gold clients, just ask us to change this paragraph.

Call Us with Questions

Business owners can’t afford to ignore the smartphone revolution any longer.

Update your site – and make your business more accessible – by adding the Mobile-Friendly Home Page today.

If you have any questions about how this page works, just give us a call at 1-800-896-4500, or email our webmasters at support@cpasitesolutions.com.

If you need a CPA website and you want one that works on smartphones, try CPA Site Solutions free for 60 days.

Our Design Portfolio for websites for accountants grew by 6 this month. We’re betting you’ll like the big, bright graphics and uncluttered look of these new pages.

Remember, you can change your design at no charge. And now is the perfect time to update, before busy season strikes again.

Note: These are Gold-level designs. If you’re a Silver client and would like to upgrade to a design below, consider an upgrade to Gold. Of course, Silver clients can always upgrade to a Silver design at no charge – just check out our Design Portfolio.

Design 458 Gold	Design 459 Gold
Design 460 Gold	Design 461 Gold
Design 462 Gold	Design 463 Gold

Try a new look today. It only takes a few minutes of your time – and it’s fun!

How to Upgrade

If you’d like to swap out your current style for one of these new designs – or any of the options in our portfolio – just give us a call at 1-800-896-4500. Or email one of our webmasters at support@cpasitesolutions.com.

Q: What feature of CPA websites skyrocketed in popularity in 2010, with usage increasing nearly 550%?

A: The secure Client Portal.

That’s right. Once misunderstood and unappreciated, the Client Portal is finally enjoying the adulation it deserves.

Small business owners, taxpayers, and other accounting clients are smartly using the Portal to increase convenience, efficiency, and security.

That’s fantastic, and we’re delighted, because we know it makes your lives as accountants easier, too.

But what about the clients who still don’t see the benefit? How do we convince them to make the switch from email (which is cumbersome and, more important, not secure) or snail mail (which is just too slow in this day and age) to exchanging and storing files in the Client Portal?

We thought we’d let your clients see it in action – with a video.

New Client Portal Page for Your Website – Now with Video

If you think your clients need a bit more nudging to register for your secure Client Portal, then consider adding our new page describing the Client Portal.

It includes a one-minute video that shows just how clients use the Portal to exchange files with you.

Here’s how the new page looks:

And here’s the video:

Learning something new by reading about it is fine… but watching a video works much better. Being able to see how easy the Client Portal really is – how few clicks it takes to navigate and how intuitive it is – helps clients embrace it.

How to Get the New Page

To take advantage of this new page and convince more of your clients to use the Portal, either ask us or do it yourself:

• For our Gold and Platinum clients: give us a call at 1-800-896-4500, email support@cpasitesolutions.com, or leave a comment below. We’ll get the new page added within 1 business day.
• For our Silver clients: all you have to do is remove the old Client Portal page and add the new page with the video. Read this Help file for instructions on how to remove and add a page. The page is called “Client Portal.”
• Sole Proprietor or Multi-Partner Firm? If you’re a sole proprietor, you can add the video that uses “I” language instead of the default “we” language. That page is “Client Portal (Sole Proprietor).”

A Note on SecureSend

The video refers to SecureSend, which was formerly known as QuickSend. SecureSend allows your clients to quickly and securely send files to the Client Portal without having to log in to their account, or even have an account. It’s an even easier way to use the Client Portal – and it’s totally secure because it retains the Portal’s 14 layers of security.

If you have not yet added SecureSend to your site, you should add it now so that the video makes sense to your clients.

Silver clients, read this Help file to learn how to add the page, and read this Help file to see how to change the name of the page from QuickSend to SecureSend.

Of course, if you’re a Gold or Platinum client, we’ll take care of this for you.

Questions? Just Give Us a Call

If you’re unsure of the benefits of adding the new Client Portal page, or you’re unclear on how to do so, just give us a call at 1-800-896-4500, or email support@cpasitesolutions.com. We’re here to help you.

What other tactics have you used to “sell” your clients on the Portal? Let us know with a comment, or post your suggestion on our Facebook wall.

Client portals on CPA websites allow for secure exchange of important tax documents. Clients use them to upload files and then you download them so you can get to work on their account.

But during busy season your clients are uploading a lot of files through your CPA website’s client portal.

Sometimes it’s difficult to keep track of who is sending which files to whom.

Maybe you’re frustrated because you don’t have time to navigate through all of these files to figure out which ones have been uploaded most recently.

Some of our clients mentioned these frustrations and we listened.

We figured out a solution to the problem that will not only simplify your workload during busy season, but all year round too.

It’s called Quick Download.

Quick Download is a terrific new feature for your CPA website that eliminates confusion about which files your clients have uploaded most recently so that you can quickly download the client files that you need right now.

To launch the Quick Download application just log in to  your file vault and click on the Quick Download folder.

Quick download is easy to use too.

Once you open up the Quick Download folder you can quickly scan the files to see who has uploaded which files most recently. Then you have the option to either download the files or delete them.

Quick Download makes it easier to keep track of your clients.

Try it now!

If you have any questions about the Quick Download feature, please call a dedicated webmaster at 1-800-896-4500, or email us at support@cpasitesolutions.com.

Do you need a CPA website? All of our service level plans include secure client portals featuring the Quick Download application. Sign up now and get a 2-month risk-free trial.