Every web site has to contain a specific message, a reason for users to visit. What could make your accounting website different to the next? The design, clear message, ability to be found or perhaps a webapp your clients could use? We studied several hundred web sites of accounting companies and analyzed few key quiddities we found. Here are then six and a half simple rules to follow when designing a web site for an accounting company.

1 Which accounting services you provide?

Most accounting sites have a list of services they provide. From visitors perspective, our guess is that majority of people unfamiliar with accounting specific terms have to guess if your accounting firm is a good fit for them. The list of services is good, however, a prominently exposed list accompanied with a brief description would provide much richer experience. Moreover, it will help drive traffic to your web site from search engines.

2 Who´s working for you?

Visitors like to know who you are, watch pictures of your employees. A trustworthy relationship between bookkeepers and entrepreneurs is important for keeping trade secrets and other sensitive information for leaking, hence make sure to include a section which gives even a brief overview of your staff. A mini biography on each staff member adds some personal touch and establishes necessary credibility of your firm to prospective new clients.

3 Educate your clients

Tax Offices usually release new rulings on issues relating to taxation legislation regularly. Most likely your clients don’t understand these as well as you do. They are waiting your professional opinion on the matter and how it could impact or benefit them - an opportunity for a newsletter content and publishing it on your web site. Strenghten your relationship with your clients.

3,5 Checklists 

Another useful tool for clients and even prospective clients is providing a collection of simple yet essential checklists or guides they can use for particular tasks. Smart companies use their website as a passive customer help tool, why don’t you?

4 Arm your company’s site with an online application

Leverage technology because it is now more accessible than ever. There are so many ways to create something innovatively useful for your clients and drive traffic to your site. It can be an essential tool, calculator, interaction model or whatever people find handy. Think what could add value to your service, differentiate you from others while reducing your workload. 

Software is moving to the web and it is now possible to make applications much simpler to use and to live with. Find great design companies to collaborate with business development. You rarely need an IT guy in your company these days. For easy maintenance of your site, ask for an easy content management system with no need for a HTML programming knowledge.

5 Write well and be elegant in style

Remember, driving traffic to your site is not an easy task. Take that extra effort - provide good content, explain balance sheets, profit and loss statements etc. Keep it simple, clean. People will find it sooner or later and link to it. 

If your site’s appearance looks like out from the 90’s then change it. It feels like stepping into an untidy office. Visual appeal accompanied with easy navigation can make or brake the good first impression. And you can only leave the first impression once.

6 Career possibilities

Every company would like to attract the brightest heads. In a competitive recruitment market your presence in the web should be used wisely. University graduates are scanning your web site and make their inital decision based on emotions (or known brand name). 

In other industries we´ve found effective to include employee benefits, possibilities for professional development and training. Moreover, consider the social aspects of working for your firm. Photos of your office evoke positive emotions. To eliminate confusion, you may also like to have a positions available section.

Conclusion

So, there were six and a half golder rules for creating a better user experience for clients of accounting companies. Human computer interaction has indeed so many interesting facets and would be long journey to describe all of them. Therefore, we selected the ones that we find are crucial for engineering a remarkable online experience.

Well designed web site (or web application) adds credibility, hence creates better bottom line for your business. User experience design reduces excessive features which miss the needs of the user while incorporating business and marketing goals.

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Here is a problem that I have had for some time with Photoshop. When I design something in PS and hit "Save for Web & Devices" to export web safe portable network graphics (PNG) file then it always appears lighter (washed out) on the web than I originally see it in Photoshop. For example, notice the difference when viewing the gradient in PS (left) and on the web browser (right).

It came out that it's a simple color balance issue. When an image is created in RGB, PS embeds a color profile to the document to keep colors correct in color managed applications. But, the Internet isn't color managed so when image is saved for web the color profile is stripped and the colors shift slightly.

All browsers assume an RGB image is sRGB and many formats like GIF and PNG don't support color spaces. This problem only affects those viewing the image on a Mac, not Windows since Windows, and browsers on Windows aren't as picky about color balance (gamma 1.8 vs gamma 2.2), and they are much more forgiving when using sRGB.

Solve it

Knowing that above, I now needed to get my Photoshop showing the same colors as they appear on web browsers on a Mac (PC was okay, they just come a little darker then).  

Firstly, to be safe I needed to change PS color settings from Edit > Color Settings and changed my RGB working space to "sRGB IEC61966-2.1". 

Secondly, I made sure I was working on Macintosh RGB proof color space by View > Proof Setup > and select Macintosh RGB or Monitor RGB when I work on a Mac. That way I create artwork correctly from the beginning. And that should do the trick!

Good luck!

Tip: You can toggle between Windows and Macintosh proofing views by pressing "Command" + "Y". 

Note: If you work on a Mac but have your monitor calibrated to 2.2 Television Gamma, then you probably don't experience that problem.

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