I’ve been asked by a lot of Do-it-Yourselfers over the years what they should put in their cpa websites. At the bare minimum you need to provide prospects with enough information that they can find you so your site absolutely, positively needs the following pages:
- Contact Us – with your details and perhaps an email contact form
- Our Services – details about your core and added value services, plus contact names for specialist areas
- About Us – perhaps with a short history of the firm and details of the principal staff
- Firm Profile – explain why a prospective client should work with you
This is a brochure site. You don’t need me, or any other accounting website designer, to have a site like this. Just go to www.godaddy.com and set up a site with them.
A brochure site won’t land you new clients, help you retain your existing clients, or decrease your operating costs. All it will do is keep you from looking like a dinosaur when you are doing your traditional marketing and make it easy for your current clients to find your office and phone number when they need it.
If you are looking for a website that can actually help you increase your community exposure and bring new clients into your business you’ll need to add some real content to the site. Tax rates and facts, Budget summaries and business content give your site depth, extra value for clients and a reason for visitors to return to the site.
You’re going to need to find a real accounting website designer at this point.
News stories and free reports- whether they’re about the firm itself, client successes or general tax and business news – will keep your site looking ‘alive’. But be warned: if you have news, you need to keep it up-to date. A ‘latest news’ page that hasn’t been touched for six months or more is worse than no news at all.
Interactive features such as calculators, links, downloadable forms and PDFs will take your site to the next level and provide a genuinely impressive online resource that can be used to great effect as marketing tools by providing real, tangible reasons to visit your site not just once, but repeatedly.
In all my years designing websites for CPA’s one of the most infuriating problems I have is when a new client comes to me with an existing website ready to take the next step and we find out that he doesn’t even own the domain name he’s been using for years!
Don’t be taken in by this scam. Many web hosts will offer to reserve the domain name for you, then turn around and reserve the domain in their own name in an account that you can’t access. And don’t think that dealing with a large company is any protection! My biggest competitor does this, and they actually charge people a $50 fee when they leave if they want to take the domain name with them!
When allowing a host to purchase your domain name ask them some screening questions:
- Will the domain be registered in my name?
- Will I be listed as the “Administrative Contact”?
- Will the domain be reserved in a retail account in my name with a control panel that I can access?
- Can I lock you out of that control panel if I choose to?
- Can I continue to manage my domain through this control panel even if I decide to stop hosting through you?
If the answer to ANY of these questions is “No” politely inform the representative you are speaking with that you will reserve the domain yourself.
It is easy to register your own domain and it will guarantee that you can keep control of your address even when you change website providers. Registering a URL is easy and usually very cheap (less than $15 a year).
My company provides a service that meets all these criteria and caters specifically to accountants and CPAs. When I do a client registration I set them up with a retail account in their name on this service. They can lock me out simply by changing their password and if they ever leave our hosting service they will be able to continue to manage their domain themselves. They not only own their domain, they actually have administrative control over it.
Your domain name is your real estate on the web. Make sure you actually own it and not your web host!
TIP
When you change your Email address always make sure you log into your domain name registrars site first and make sure they have the new email. It may save you a HUGE headache when the time comes to renew.
