The price of setting up a custom CPA and Accounting website design can quickly get out of control, but if you know a few simple tricks you can greatly shrink if, not eliminate, your set-up expenses.
First, ask yourself, "Do I truthfully need a custom site". There are astoundingly few advantages to getting a "from the ground-up" custom CPA and Accounting website.
You might ascertain that a template is a better choice for your service. Many of the challenges broadly associated with templates, mainly search engine optimization and flexibility, have been fixed by recent tools.
A lot of owners drive their costs up and delay their site publication for months worrying about the least important element of a site design. The graphic design should be completely finalized before your designer writes a single line of code. The look of the website isn't that important to the websites overall effectiveness.
You're going to be up to your eyeballs creating content for your site. Don't make the process harder and more expensive by obsessing on the appearance of the site. Get it done, and get it done fast. If your designer is any good at all you should be able to get the graphic design decisions made in a few drafts. It may not be perfect, but it'll be good. A custom CPA and Accounting website design will cost a lot of money; at least $2000. If you have a good reason to spend that much go for it, just be sure it's not a vanity expense, because in terms of building your accounting practice there are usually better ways to spend that money. There are a lot of companies that provide excellent accounting and tax website templates. As a rule template sites are more than adequate for a small CPA firm, and will contain much better content than a low-end custom site.
If you decide that having the unique look and feel is worth some extra money you may still be able to avoid the bulk of the expenses accrued by setting up a custom site. Some companies that provide accounting or CPA website templates will be able to modify an existing template to suit your needs much more cheaply than the cost of a full blown custom site.
Before making this decision, consider this. Unless you plan to take up web design your website will never exactly match your vision. Accountants are often type A personalities and, as a rule, are in the habit of (and are well paid for) managing tiny details. Unfortunately a keen attention to detail does not automatically imbue us with a sense of balance, a flare for RGB color matching, or an ability to build an intuitive navigation structure. Don't let yourself get caught in a cycle of doing draft after draft of your website. You won't get a better website for your trouble, just a more expensive one. You may even force your designer into a corner where he decides to just do what's easy (exactly what you want) rather than what's right. It's not really possible to get exactly what you want unless you do it yourself. Try to come in to the design process with an open mind about what your site is going to look like.
A website is primarily a commercial product, not an artistic one. If you look at highly successful A-list sites like Google, CraigsList and Reddit you'll see that aesthetics is really not all that important to designing a successful site.
Your ability to provide accurate and timely tax and financial advice and preparation is far more important than your eye for color and balance, so stick to what you do best and trust your designer to do the same.
The number one reason for design cost overruns is overestimating the importance of graphic design. It's a lot cheaper to make design changes to a website during the planning phase than it is once the coding starts. Make your design choices up front using mock-ups, and once you finalize it stick to your guns. Once the coding process begins even seemingly minor changes become very expensive.
The key to custom CPA and Accounting site design is to find a good designer. Find a skilled and experienced designer who understands your basic vision and trust his or her process. It's important to keep your focus on what really matters.
Don't treat your website like a product roll-out, treat it as what it is: a marketing instrument. I've had a lot of clients refuse to publish until the website's "perfect". It breaks my heart to see perfectly good sites sit unpublished for months or even years because the owner is overly focused on making it "Perfect". As far as I'm concerned the revenues they lost because the site's not up might just as well be added to their development costs. It's just not worth the time and money they spent, and lost, getting the site "just so". The most ironic part is that while they may have a really nice site, it's a site designed to appeal to the website owner. This is not a good advertising paradigm. A lot of advertisers and marketers are afraid to honestly confront this issue with their clients, and knowingly let them wander down this particular garden path. Your website should be designed to appeal to your prospects, not to you. This brings us back to content. The function of your graphic design is to keep visitors from hitting the back button the first time they see your site, anything beyond that is just gravy. What matters is having useful, diverse content and presenting it in a personable, easy to navigate way.
Closely related to a futile drive for perfection is a need to "finish" the site. This is also a trap. Website design is a lot like building a house. Once the site is up it needs to be maintained and improved. Your CPA website won't ever be "finished". I've had clients put off publishing sites for months waiting to finish the site. This is a trouble doubled. It's unhealthy to let yourself think of your website as finished. As soon as you do it will quickly slide in obsolescence.
We've all seen sites like this, with news and tax updates years out of date and broken links all over it. Are you impressed by sites like this? Well... neither are your clients and prospects.
Once the decision to invest in a website is made treat it like a proper business expense. Get the website up and working for you as quickly as possible. A website only has value if it's public. Not only will it start making money for you, it will also begin accumulating domain authority in the search engines. Once the site is open you can continue to tweak it all you like. Tweaking the site once it's open will actually help you get your accounting website noticed by the search engines.
Treat your website as an investment in your company, because that's what it is. Whether you determine to set up a custom CPA and Accounting design or start with a template and shape it from there, get your website up promptly and let your contacts watch as it unremittingly improves.
Brian O'Connell is the CEO and founder of CPA Site Solutions, one of the country's leading website design businesses dedicated exclusively to accounting website design. His firm at present provides websites for more than 4000 CPA, accounting, and tax preparation firms.
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