Web development for your accounting practice

Written by Adrian Law on April 24th 2020

You’re a small- to medium-sized accounting practice with a few employees and a good word-of-mouth reputation, and you’re looking to grow and expand your customer base. With so much of today’s traffic and activity happening online, it’s more important than ever before to have a professional website promoting your business. With the recent refurbishment and redesign of our own website, we have gained much experience in the field of web development, so here’s some of what we’ve found.

Your website carries your business’s outward-facing identity

Your online presence matters! Clients discovering your practice for the first time will likely go to your website before any other place, and even those who have heard of you by word-of-mouth may check out your website in addition to holding onto a business card. In our technologically fast-paced environment, potential clients will probably contact you online rather than walk through the door, so it’s important for your website to give a positive first impression.

What do you want visitors to know about you when they click your result among many others on Google? What makes your website and your business stand out – hopefully in a good way! – from the rest? Can visitors see everything you want them to know in a short time? These are some of the questions you should address when setting up your website.

Both design and information are important here. Your site doesn’t have to be flashy, but it also shouldn’t look extremely basic. Aim for a clean layout with perhaps a personalised colour scheme, and try to make sure text and images aren’t too sparse or cluttered.

Finally, it’s important to host your website on a domain that represents your company’s identity. A range of hosting companies, based in Australia or around the world, provide a range of plans, and your choice will depend on your requirements and any potential growth you see. The important feature to look out for is a custom domain – your professional website deserves its own address, like “mybusiness.com.au” and not “mybusiness.squarespace.com”. Fortunately, most if not all hosting solutions will offer a domain, either included or at extra cost.

There’s more than one tool for the job

There are so many platforms and resources available on the internet, many of which are free. Building a website has never been easier. Many platforms advertise the ability to have a beautiful website ready in minutes, such as the likes of Squarespace or Wix. Content Management Systems (CMSs), such as WordPress, are also a popular choice to have all your content easily editable and access to customise your website’s appearance and functionality. Finally, building a website from scratch using HTML, CSS and JavaScript – the fundamental code technologies that websites use – has never been easier with the vast amount of resources, many free, on the internet. Whether you want to get hands-on or find a dedicated team to get your website running, how can you know what’s the best option for you?

Each approach has its pros and cons. All of them will be suitable for your practice’s website unless you have specific needs, such as member login or e-commerce (online selling) functionality.

The advantage of website building tools is how quickly you can set up your site, with included themes or templates. No coding knowledge at all is required, though many platforms have the option to customise the design for the tech-savvy. However, flexibility is still limited compared to the other options.
A CMS, particularly a popular one such as WordPress, has much of the previous advantages but with more powerful tools available for customisation thanks to the many developers who use it and build plugins for it. On the other hand, with more options comes more expertise and time investment needed to take full advantage of the platform, as well as to distinguish your site from other sites using similar templates.
Finally, having your website coded by yourself or a developer is the most technically demanding, but opens the most opportunities to adapt to any new requirements. With full control and responsibility over your website’s code, you lose some of the benefits of using existing templates, but the possibilities to develop something in-house are endless.

Lotus Network Solutions recently underwent a refurbishment of our website, migrating from a solely WordPress-based website to a hybrid solution, with much of the website coded in JavaScript with the help of the Gatsby static site generator and the powerful React library, but leveraging existing WordPress tools for added functionality. (For further reading, this approach is called a “headless CMS“.)

Finally, if all that was confusing, don’t worry! Almost every developer will be able to help you navigate these choices, and many will have a particular skillset to produce the best results.

Get your website found

So you have a new well-designed website with details about your business, but how do you get from launching your site to getting it seen on Google? There’s no magic wand solution, but it’s a process that can take some time called Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Google themselves provide some valuable information about how to optimise your website, and much more is available on the internet. But here are some brief tips from us:

Google looks for web best practices such as the way your content is structured. Make sure elements such as headings, text sections and navigation sections are formatted correctly using HTML tags.
Make sure your website doesn’t have too many pages and sub-pages, but also that content is divided sensibly and isn’t all on one page.
Have interesting content! Google can’t pick up your website if there’s not enough to find, and Google responds negatively if people click your website and then leave because it didn’t have what they were looking for.

What next?

We’ve barely scratched the tip of the iceberg here. Depending on your business, a social media strategy can also bring much more traffic. We haven’t touched on what sort of content to include, and that will depend on your business’s target audience as well. But the takeaway here is: your website is your virtual storefront, so be attractive and informative to draw people in!

Finally, if any of that was confusing, don’t worry! There are so many developers available to help you navigate these choices, and many will have a particular skillset to produce the best results. And if you want to investigate more yourself, then Google is your best friend – both for resources, and examples of websites that are already doing well and looking good.

Lotus Network Solutions offers website development services, domain management and more. If you’d like to find out more, head over to our Services page.