Prune Your Cpa Website Design Expenses
Custom accounting website design is not inexpensive
. Expenses can quickly and easily get out of control, but there are a few simple trade secrets that will seriously shrink, if not entirely obviate, these setup expenses.
Before you decide to use one ask yourself if you genuinely need a custom website.
Personally I endorse utilizing a template instead of investing in a custom design.
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. There's no reason you shouldn't be able to get the job done in two or three drafts. Will it be perfect? Probably not. But it will be good! A custom CPA and Accounting site 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 consider all these factors and you still feel that a custom site is the solution for you there are some cheats that might help you keep your costs way down. 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.
Think about a few website design basics before making a final decision. 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. This might make you a good accountant, but it may not necessarily make you a good graphic designer. Doing draft after draft of your website is going to get very expensive very quickly. It's just not a good idea to indulge in artistic expression when someone else is holding the brush. It's best to approach the design process with an open mind about what the final result will be.
Keep in mind that the look of the site really isn't all that important. Consider Google, CraigsList, and Reddit. All are A-list websites, and all have site styles that range from minimalist to just plain ugly. Aesthetics just isn't that important to designing a commercially successful website.
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.
I can't tell you how many hours I've spent on colors. Color is an important element of a website, but some folks just don't get it. Every monitor on the planet displays color a little differently.
The key to custom accounting website 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". All they've accomplished is creating a website that appeals to them. This is not a good advertising paradigm. Too many advertisers are afraid to confront their clients on this issue and just let them do this. Your website should be designed to appeal to your prospects, not to you. The perfect shade of blue really won't help much attracting a wide range of prospects. It's your content that will really showcase your accounting practice. If your content is useful, the presentation is friendly, and the site is easy to navigate your visitors will be back again and again until they finally decide to step into your sales funnel.
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 accounting or CPA website won't ever actually be "finished". If you wait to take your website public until it's "finished" you'll never get it up, and if you ever allow yourself to treat your website as "finished" it will quickly slide into obsolescence.
You've seen sites like this. The news reports and tax updates are out of date. The links on the site are all broken or mapped to the wrong site. How impressed are you by these sites?
Once you decide to get a website, make your priority to get it up 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. In fact the more tweaking you do the better. The search engines respect sites that continue to grow and change once they open.
Your website is an investment in your practice. Handle it like you'd treat a new lobby, a cold-call campaign, or any normal marketing expense. It doesn't matter if you opt to use a custom accounting site design or begin with a template. What matters is that you get the lead out, get the site up quickly, and let your customers and prospects observe as you unremittingly form it to suit their needs.
by: Brian O'Connell
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