One of the most important aspects of your website will be how visitors navigate their way through the site. You need to make sure it is quick and easy for people to find the exact information they are looking for.

The navigation bar, usually at the top of your website, is the most important single design element you’ll need to decide on. It will be the launch point to everything your website has to offer. It needs to be put together in a way that is visually appealing and at the same time it needs to be intuitive enough that people can find what they are looking for without having to hunt through your site.

BTW… here’s a quick tip: If you have a logo you use to represent your company you can boost your brand recognition by including it in the navigation bar. People who like your site will spend a lot of time looking at the nav bar… and your brand image!

Make sure the nav style fits the feel of your website. If the rest of the website is bright and eye-catching, don’t make the navigation bar dull and ordinary. Use colors and graphics that will stand out, but not provide a distraction to your website visitors.

If your website has, for example, four pages then you need to make sure each page has a place within the site’s navigation. It should help visitors determine what information they need about you and the services you provide.

When it comes to your navigation bar, make it simple and straightforward. This is what people are looking for even if they don’t consciously know it.

Use subnavigation to direct visitors deeper into your website. This will allow them to scan the site and determine which pages they want to view and which ones they don’t need to view without having to actually navigate from page to page.

Here’s another quick design trend to consider… if you want your site to stand out from your competitors’, consider putting your navigation bar at the bottom of your website. This makes your website look uncomplicated, which is important in the accounting industry. There are limitations to this trick, of course. You need to make the nav bar stand out visually without being jarring. The unique aspect of a navigation bar on the bottom of your website, though, is that most of the bar will disappear until the visitor hovers their mouse over it, making it extremely interactive and visually appealing.

It is important to have your site visitors interact with the navigation bar. This will cause them to click on each link to see what they will find.

Generally speaking, when people think of finding an accountant they automatically think the process will be complicated. The lack of complications on your website will encourage people to turn to you for their accounting needs.

You will often hear the expression “Content is King”, but in many ways Navigation is the real key to a successful website.

by Brian O’Connell

Brian O’Connell is the President and founder of CPA Site Solutions, one of the country’s largest website companies oriented exclusively to CPA websites.

Responsive web design is all about creating a website that is optimized for any type of device with an Internet connection.

The old, standard version of your website isn’t compatible with many smartphones and tablets, which limits your possibilities. You want your clients to be able to view your website whether they are at home accessing it on their computer or traveling and accessing it by a mobile device.

A website that is hard to navigate is a big enough hindrance on an actual computer. If a potential client goes to your website on a mobile device and they can’t easily navigate their way through it, most likely you will lose their business.

Responsive website design stems from the concept that is responsive architecture. After writing an article on the subject, Ethan Marcotte was inspired to apply the concept of responsive architecture to website design.

For your accounting website to be considered responsive it must contain certain features. Those features are flexible images, a fluid grid and media queries.

A flexible image refers to one where both the width and the height of the image can be changed when necessary. When a website designed to be responsive is accessed through a browser the images will automatically conform to the browser’s specifications. A fluid grid refers to a website layout that can adapt to landscape or portrait settings. The layout of the webpage is adjusted to fit the device it is being viewed on. Media queries make it possible to experiment with the codes that effect a webpage’s layout.

For accounting website design, this design method is especially important because you work in a very competitive field and if your website can’t keep up with the times your competition will have an edge over you.

To design a website in this style takes a webmaster who thinks in abstract terms. It takes a lot of creativity to successfully design a responsive website so make sure you carefully choose the person who will be designing or redesigning your website. Ideally you want to use a designer who has had experience with this in the past. It is crucial to the growth of your website and your company to have an accounting website design that complies with this technique.

by Erik Thomsen

Erik Thomsen is a website designer and account manager for CPA Site Solutions, a Vermont based firm that provides CPA and accounting websites to practices in the United States.

Passion and skills aside, you also want your website designer to be focused on producing a quality site for you. If they lose focus they are not worth working with. Make sure your website designer is familiar with the accounting business. If you hire one who isn’t, you may very well end up with a site that does not reflect your occupation or does not present you and your services in a positive light. Your website designer should have a natural interest in your profession. If you have to tell them everything about your job, they are most likely not the right person to hire.

New trends are constantly popping up in the field of web design, and you want to make sure the person you hire is aware of them. This means they need to keep their website developing skills fresh and need to know all the latest news within their industry. You don’t want a website designer that doesn’t have the right skills and is stuck in the past, in a technological sense. You want your website design to be fresh and this means your website designer really has to be in tune with your professional needs and the professional needs of your current and potential clients.

Try to find a designer that specializes in building accounting websites. This gives you the edge over accountants who may have used a friend or family member to design their website because that friend or family member may not have been the best choice. One idea is to ask co-workers who designed their website. Word of mouth is an effective way to find a website designer that puts 100 % effort and passion into their job.

When you do find a web designer you are considering working with, ask to see other websites that they have designed, preferably accounting websites. If they cannot produce any prior work you may want to look elsewhere for a designer. If you want to give them a chance anyway, see if they have done any personal projects that will show you their web design skills.

Finding a web designer who uses their time wisely is also important. You want to make sure that if you give them a deadline for when you need your site completed, that they will honor that deadline. A designer that won’t or can’t honor a deadline should be avoided at all costs unless you are able and willing to be that flexible with them. You want a website designer that has time to do your site, but also one who has other clients to work for as well. If you are their only client, it may be because aren’t good at what they do.

by Erik Thomsen

Sure, having a huge smiley photo of yourself in your Sunday-best may look attractive, but it will distract visitors from the content you want them to read and also has some more dire consequences, one of which being that your site – and the image itself – will take ages to load. Be honest – would you sit and wait for a site to load? No? Neither will your visitors. Slow loading sites also struggle to get decent spots in search engine results.

On average, your combined images should take up no more than half the weight – or size in bytes – of your site. This means that images taken from your high resolution camera – usually coming in a printable size of 3456 x 2304 pixels – need to be resized and optimized. Your first step is to resize photos without losing quality – you do not want to end up with blurry or grainy pics, do you now?! For most photo galleries, 800×600 pixels or – at most – 1024×768 pixels is recommended.

Panic ye not – you do not have to be a technical genius to resize images. There is a whole bunch of free tools – like FastStone, for instance – that will help you to resize images quickly and easily without losing any quality. Even after resizing, the file size of your images may still be too high to load efficiently, so your next step is compressing them. There is no need to worry – popular tools like Smushit or ImageOptim will compress your images into handy little files that will load easily and still show off your smiling face to perfection – again without requiring any technical knowledge.

You should also optimize images for search engines by giving them a proper name and using descriptive Alt text. For instance, 1.jpg means nothing to search engines, whereas bobwhositaccountant.jpg can be recognized and indexed easily. Alt text is the alternative text that appears if your image can not be displayed for any reason. While ‘Handsome young Bob’ may be descriptive, ‘Bob Whosit of CPA Accounting firm Whosit & Associates’ is more appropriate and will assist search engines in finding/ indexing your site.

by Norm Miller

Here are the big ones…

Acting Omnipotent

You have to do more than understand your clients’ needs. You need to demonstrate that understanding to them. It can be frustrating having to walk a client through a solution that seems self-evident to you, but you MUST take the time to do it for two reasons. First, it demonstrates the client that you actually value them, and second, every now and then presuming an understanding without doing the legwork will sometimes lead you down a garden path. Sometimes you will find your assumptions were actually wrong. Hard as it may be, listen to criticism and accept help – your projects will be completed more efficiently and you will learn new things in the process.

Sloppy Search Engine Optimization

Forget the search, forget the engine – think optimization. This is where you need to put in a lot of thought. OK, you are an accountant, but choosing this term as your main keyword for meta-data and other SEO efforts will not take you very far. Actually, yes, it will – way down the search engine results. I don’t care who you are, the keyword “accountant” is too competitive for a small or medium sized independent practice to have any hope of ranking well.

In order for searchers to find you, rather than a million other accountants on the Internet, your keywords must point to you in a more specific manner. Research appropriate keywords with the help of tools like GoogleAdWords, for instance. This tool will show your competition and how often the keyword you have in mind is looked for per month. It will also suggest other, perhaps more useful terms/ phrases to use. You will no doubt find that if you focus on your town or region you will have much better luck getting a decent ranking.

Blogvertising

While your blog posts should naturally link back to your site, never, ever, use them to advertise your wonderful accounting services. Nobody reads a blog to get sales-pitch – everybody reads blogs to get useful information. Make your posts interesting; explain the intricacies and go into the depths of accounting – in short, show that you know what you are talking about, and the next time one of your readers needs an accountant, they will remember you.

The ‘Scatterbrain’ Approach

Dabbling willy-nilly into a huge list of different marketing properties will result in disaster. Create a plan incorporating a handful of properties and focus on giving your utmost in these areas. An integrated marketing plan – or strategy – should include traditional advertising media, Website and blog content, as well as social media.

None of these properties will serve your purpose on its own, but putting them together in the right fashion will have you taking off like a rocket.- which leads neatly into the final silly mistake.

Ignoring Social Media

Please do not snort at this point – social media has incredible marketing power – if you use it right. No, it is not the one tool to end all your worries. It must be part of a greater marketing/ content strategy in order to succeed. You should also have something valuable to say – creating a page for the sake of it without having something to say is pointless. But a LOT of your clients and prospects already spend time on social media sites every day. There’s a ready made audience out there just waiting to hear what you have to say. Don’t leave them hanging.

Here are two major factors to get/ keep your social media activities on the right track:
– Make messages personal – people need to know there is a person behind the connection
– Remember that different communities (Facebook, Twitter, etc) are populated by different personalities, and do not fall into the trap of posting the same message everywhere – some people have accounts with more than one community, and seeing the same message everywhere will convince them that you are spamming.

by Kenny Marshall

Kenny is the editor in chief of Marketing for Accountants, a blog dedicated entirely to helping CPA and accounting practices grow their firms.

Understanding the Basics

One of the most important components of an accounting website is its design. Accounting web design delivers an impressive combination of innovations and preferences; however, there are a few design basics that deserve special attention…

1. Implement and Optimize Primary Tools: If you innovate your accounting site will become a traffic magnet. Think about those things that have a wide appeal to your clients, such as financial, tax, and loan calculators. A newsletter helps you stay in touch with your current and prospective clients.

Make sure that you optimize these tools and other elements of your website for mobile devices. Since about 20% of traffic comes from mobile devices, opting for adaptive and responsive web design components is imperative.

2. Create Appropriate Title Tags and Page Descriptions: Some of the most authoritative SEO elements are the title tags. Long title tags are a mistake, though, since most search engines exclude any titles exceeding 70 characters. Page descriptions are also important, being indexed by search engines as part of their search processes.

3. Add Google Analytics and Social Media Icons: These elements are vital for increasing traffic to your site. While the first one allows you to check the keywords that bring traffic, the second one offers users what they are looking for; namely, sharing buttons, Facebook integration, Twitter feeds, and so on.

4. Redirect URLs: Dead links are bad. Redirecting obsolete URLs after changing your site is essential. It not only offer the best user experience, it improves SEO.

Another essential thing is to provide relevant, superior content. Although the aforementioned elements are able to improve your accounting site’s visibility, never forget that poor-quality content can break your business.

by Norm Miller

Factors to Consider When Designing Mobile Websites
Content and Layout
The amount of content, as well as how you place it on the site pages determines the ease with which users will access your mobile site. For this reason, you need to consider the text, images, links, icons, and other items that you need to place on your page to ensure that they fit perfectly. On the other hand, you should keep in mind that mobile sites are to be viewed on devices with “limited” screen sizes and capabilities. As such having a mobile site that is cramped with text, icons, images, clickable objects, or other items that are too small would make it difficult for users to read or navigate. Some top tips that will enable you to create a clean looking site include:

- Minimizing the amount of text to include only content that adds value

- Rephrasing or shortening words to fit your page

- Spacing clickable icons/links appropriately to allow for easy navigation and readability

- Using bullet points

- Using CSS to position elements neatly on the page

- Using HTML tags such as paragraph break and line break to bind, arrange or dissect words

- Responsiveness to Screen Size

The past few years has seen the proliferation of portable internet-enabled devices, ranging from smartphones to tablets. Each of these devices comes with varying screen sizes and resolutions. As such, your accounting website design and layout must be optimized to fit the wide range of mobile devices that you intend to target. You should take into account the maximum width of the elements that you place on your pages, with respect to the target devices when designing your layout and use these dimensions to format your pages. Alternatively, you could dynamically adjust and format the screen size of your HTML documents using HTML commands.

Page Load Times

A mobile website is supposed to offer convenience to users on the go, since they normally lack the patience to wait for pages to load. Portable devices have a disadvantage of lower hardware specs and limited capabilities, compared to PCs. For this reason, it may not be possible to load some of the elements on your regular website. You should avoid embedding unnecessary icons, background images, as well heavy images to minimize the page requests and load times. Take advantage of innovative technologies such as HTML5’s canvas element, and CSS3 properties to eliminate the use of images. CSS3 is effective in creating basic styles such as rounded corners, gradients and other basic styles, which are useful in limiting the number and size of images.

User Data Input

Filling web forms is a tedious task for mobile device users since they don’t have much time to scroll through long pages or fill in endless fields. Since users use their fingers as the typical tool for navigation, convenience should be a major consideration when including data input forms in your accounting website design. You should focus on creating simple forms that only request for significant information from the users. In addition, you should consider using elements such as check boxes and radio buttons that will simplify the process for users to submit data. These elements eliminate the need for users to type text into the fields.

Blogging is the single best way to do this.

Finding the time to write and publish blog posts may seem like a challenge but by following these rules you will entice your readers to keep coming back for more.

Rule #1: Play to Your Strengths

You are an accounting professional; write about what you know. Stick to the topic at hand and don’t stray from it. The idea is to spend exactly zero time doing research. As you go throughout your workweek, you will undoubtedly encounter challenges that will inspire you with topics to write about. Stick with that and don’t stray from the material that is relevant to your audience.

A note about original content: Writing about what you know means that you are writing original content in your own words. Plagiarism is never acceptable as it is not only illegal, it will seriously damage your ranking. Cheating in this fashion will also undermine your credibility as an accountant.

Rule #2: Place Your Keyword in the First Sentence

Make sure your keyword appears in the first sentence of your article. Many search engines will display the first sentence of your article along with the title of a piece. Make sure that sentence grabs your audience’s attention and offers them information they find valuable. There is nothing wrong with having the keywords sprinkled throughout your article as well; just make sure they are natural and legitimate or your website will be penalized by dropping in rank.

Rule #3: Craft Your Title Carefully

Think about the content you prefer to read online and consider what incites you to click a link. What you’ll most likely realize is that if the title doesn’t grab your attention you pass that link by. As the purpose of your website is to build an audience with an eye towards converting that audience into paying clients, you definitely do not want readers passing over your articles and choosing those written by your competition. Keep your title concise but interesting.

Make sure your title is not misleading! When a reader is lured to your page by your title but finds that the content is not what they thought it was, they will immediately leave. This action is typically referred to as “bouncing” and it will negatively affect your rankings.

Rule #4: Don’t Be Too Wordy

You know enough about accounting that you could probably write a small book about. Do not give in to that temptation. An article that is too long will intimidate readers who do not have a lot of time or will lose their interest long before its completion. Aim for articles between 500 and 700 words long. Many writers find it helpful to pick three or four points and save any connecting tangents for their next article.

Rule #5: Let Your Content Breathe

A common mistake that beginning bloggers make is that they pay very little attention to how their content looks on a page. Your audience is not interested in a text-wall so do not give them one. Break your article up by using sub-headings, lists or bullet points. Do not go crazy with lists or points, however; remember rule #4.

by Norm Miller

JPEG Images
When your accounting website design needs an image, the basic way is to simply include a JPG or JPEG file. When you’re going to use a photograph that you’ve scanned or uploaded from a camera, a JPEG is the simplest and easiest type of image to load. Every computer released since Windows 3.1 can play these images and the file type has been common since the dawning days of the Internet.

Another great thing about JPEGs is that they work well for charts, graphs and other basic illustrations. The comparatively tiny size and the wide range of colors available in a JPEG. With 16.7 million colors to choose from, you can illustrate a lot of points with a supreme level of nuance. However, there are plenty of specialty uses for images that a JPEG simply isn’t good for.

GIF Images
There are a lot of occasions when movements and transparencies are useful components of an image. When you want to make a point that involves movement, change or the indication of some other element on your web page, you can’t use a JPEG for this. An entirely different kind of image is necessary.

Traditionally, when your accounting website design required an image with animations you used a GIF for the purpose. GIFs are 8-bit and feature a palette of up to 256 colors, and they allow you to customize their looks and appearance of movement easily through the use of almost any image editing software. GIFs are also useful because they can be animated and allow transparency. However, GIFs are obsolete because newer and better image and animation types now exist.

While there are still some websites that feature GIFs, this is primarily because the images were grandfathered in or the web designer was an amateur who was not up to date on the latest practices. In modern accounting website design, you can achieve a far cleaner and more professional look through more appropriate image types.

PNG Images
Modern image files allow a much broader range of colors and effects. While 256 colors allowed a large number of interesting shapes and movements, having color depth almost equal to that of a JPEG and all kinds of additional special effects adds a whole new dimension to the images and what they’re capable of. PNG files are the current industry standard for the clearest uses of transparency and the sharpest non-photographic images. They can also be edited with nearly the same level of ease as GIFs using modern image-editing software.

FLV Files
Today’s standard for moving images is FLV, the file type used by Flash, but this format is being driven out of fashion by new devices (smartphones and tablets) that don’t support it. If you’ve gone to any fancy website over the past few years, you’ve seen flash graphics. The difference between FLV files and GIFs is like comparing a horse-drawn carriage to an Indy car: boxy versus sleek and very limited versus undeniably capable.

The lack of support on mobile devices, unfortunately, spells the end of the flash era. Soon it will fall by the wayside like the GIF before it. Don’t worry, though. HTML5 is waiting in the wings to replace it.

There is a lot to consider when you’re out to make your website look great. You need to use the best image types available to make your website load well, look beautiful and express your professional quality to the best extent possible. Looking your best means using the best image files.

by Kenny Marshall

Kenny is the editor of Marketing for Accountants and has 10 years of experience as a CPA Website Designer.

But for honest marketers looking to corner a piece of the web it’s still a very viable strategy, and the accounting field is wide open for a few experts to start providing high quality expert content to a large variety of high authority publishers and small blogs alike.

People are increasingly dependent on the internet for finding qualified professional services, so an accounting firm’s prospective client base increases tremendously if it has a solid online marketing plan. CPA firms and other accountancy services need to have good websites and they need to know how to market themselves on the web.

A good way to do that is to establish yourself as a “maven”, or expert, using a strategy called content marketing.

Most firms have websites but this isn’t enough in itself to attract new customers and to keep others coming back. You must also use other marketing tools and techniques to be able to reach out to the largest possible number of people.

You must create a website with content that can really reach out to people. It should be well constructed and easy to use. It should also use language that can be easily understood by lay people. The information contained in the website needs to be as clear and to the point. It should be easy to navigate and contain a wealth of genuinely useful information on matters pertaining to accounting, tax and business management issues: topics beneficial to the kind of people who may want to visit such a site.

Your ranking in Google will dictate to a very high degree the number of prospects that find your site.

A website with content that uses keywords used frequently by users when searching is likely to be ranked highly. This is because Google looks at your pages and calculates keyword usage as part of it’s ranking algorithm. Better rankings mean more traffic, and more traffic means more prospects.

This is where content distribution comes into play! You see, another major way of improving your Google rank is by attracting credible external links by publishing articles, books and journals that are practical and educational. If the information published is genuinely useful people are likely to republish or reference them and give you credit by linking back to your site.

Good links do more than improve your search results, though. They also attract traffic.

To keep these new visitors coming back you need a website that sincerely informs those who visit the site. The key to successful online marketing is getting traffic to come back to your site repeatedly. By ensuring that information contained in the website is updated, reliable, and relevant to the clientele you will inspire return traffic. This will keep your brand in front of prospects until they are ready to buy. Free reports on financial and business planning, newsletters, and financial calculators can keep your prospects on the hook for years if need be.

The apparent aim of accounting websites is to make customers aware of the services available when they need such services, but the real purpose is to put your brand in front of the widest possible audience as cheaply as possible and keep it there until they are ready to buy!

by Norm Miller