Content Management Systems Alter the way CPA Websites are Created

A lot of small firm owners are still spending far too much money every year to have a well paid professional manage their CPA websites. You don´t have to have an stale site full of exhausted features just because you dread the expense and frustration of getting your designer to fix it for you.

Significant changes have been made to the way we design CPA websites. Quite recently website designers had to be familiar with unfamiliar programming languages like ASP and PHP and masters of HTML generators like Dreamweaver. This person needed a great deal of training and the industry was completely hooked on these expensive professionals. Well, things change. Nowadays things are enormously different.

There is an original new technology called a “Content Management System” or “CMS” that makes these costly professionals unnecessary for any but the most difficult website changes. This method makes it feasible for any fairly computer adept individual to be their own webmaster. Basically all a Content Management System is, essentially, is a “point and click website editor”. It allows you to add and cut out pages. You can also modify pages using what is often referred to as a “WYSIWYG editor” which is really just an immensely easy word processor. WYSIWYG merely stands for “What You See is What You Get”. It allows you to plan the pages, set up tables and upload images of all kinds. It also enables you to arrange pages by editing the site’s Navigation Menu.

In brief, a Content Management System allows nearly anyone to efficiently and effortlessly do all the routines that took a highly trained coder hours to do merely a decade ago.

Very nearly every leading hosting service of first-class CPA websites has a free or low-priced content management system with hosted sites.

Obviously the outstanding difference between a CMS and a custom website designer is expense. For most small CPA firms this is a big difference. Despite making make as much as $45 or more an hour, most website designers are usually not as motivated as you are to get your work taken care of in a quick manner. It´s not unusual for turn-around times on pro website design jobs to be a weeks or more.

If these costs seem high to you brace yourself. These costs don’t even include the cost of actually designing the site. It can easily take 200 hours or more to design first-class CPA websites from scratch. That translates to thousands of dollars invested and months of waiting. Content Management System website providers get around this expense by building the sites in advance and presenting menus of “ready-to-use” styles.

A lot of site owners balk at using “templates” or already have custom websites that they have spent piles of cash on and are thrilled with, so many Content Management System providers are able to fine-tune their existing templates to better reflect your brand (if not outright copy your current site) quite inexpensively. While this is a young technology it’s disseminating exceedingly fast.

Sadly, while economical and easy to manage, websites built in this way typically lack vital content. Before you duck off to a generic hosting service do a Bing search for site providers that focus on “CPA websites”. An entire side industry has sprung up encompassing the necessity for accounting focused content.

IMHO CPA Site Solutions is the best of these. For more than ten years they have innovated first-rate CPA websites.

To see what we are suggesting when we talk about “CPA specific content” take a good look at this video demonstration about CPA websites.

Note the tools chosen specially for site owners in the accounting business: free reports, tax due dates, links to tax forms and publications, a portal for transferring accounting files, interactive financial calculators, email… A site like this might be passably helpful for an enormously limited number of companies outside their intended market, maybe a financial adviser or business consultant could use much of the content on this site, but it would be worthless to a business like a retailer.

In these problematic economic times it´s time to watch out for new solutions for most small and medium sized CPA practices. Employing a Content Management System that specializes in CPA websites will cut your expenses and at the same time increase your hold over your site.

Tags : content management system, cpa websites, Website Design