Constructive criticism for a website design before going live.

[Statica]

You should've .. (if I'd known your domain name sooner, I would've advised you) .. and if there is going to be further delay on your website going live .. you should be creating a very simple placeholder page on your webhosts site .. at least saying "coming soon" with tags and all that. Then done some site submissions. So at least you're site is not going to have to wait too long for robots to come by.

Good luck with your site, Mary and David .. and "sort of what G said" .. you are going to need a lot more than just the website to get traffic or results from the site .. you need to optimize your site well .. create "clever" content on the site etc etc. Feel free to PM me if you want suggestions.

For all ya know, this tax season might be so successful that you may not need the help of the stinkin' internet with all the other promotions and good business you spread in the community

[EzyStvy]

Does she really want to post prices on line?

1. Will scare some people away without so much as a phone call.
2. Will motivate the guy down the street to under bid her.

[Jbc223456]

I think I remember in one of my English classes that any abbreviations should be removed for anything professional. You have to factor in that some people may not be familiar with the language (I.E EAs are Enrolled Agents, Cal State to California State). I know my college English teacher harps on never using contractions on professional pieces (such as I'll, write out I will; Let's written out into Let us, etc.)

Under the About Me page, I feel that the qualifications are listed, and should therefore be made as such. Nothing fancy, just an unordered list would do I think.

From a web developer's point of view, it's very easy to navigate and the colors are not too bright. Easy to read and easy to jump around and know you are still on the same site.

[David M]

Originally Posted by glc You are going to need a lot more than just a website to get business.

We figured months ago that the first step to marketing a business is to create the website and get it up and running. We see this as the beginning of the marketing. We have only told a few family members and friends (and you guys ) that we are starting a new business. What we did not want happening is for potential clients to enter in our website address only to see an icon with a note on the door saying the website is still under construction.

Now what we are going to do is place some ad's in the local paper, go to Chamber of Commerce meetings to start word of mouth there and start word of mouth with ideas we got from a few books we bought on marketing small businesses.

Originally Posted by EzyStvy Does she really want to post prices on line? 1. Will scare some people away without so much as a phone call. 2. Will motivate the guy down the street to under bid her.

We thought we would do this because we think it gives us an advantage over the competition which generally does not quote their prices in their websites. We also know that our prices are less than theirs in general. Our competition is not Turbo Tax or H&R Block. The kind of people Mary will work with are those with multiple properties, commercial properties, apartments, multiple incomes and other things which make it difficult or impossible for them to do their own taxes or to figure out all the allowable deductions. Finding those deductions, which change each year, pays for Mary's services many times over. We bought professional grade accounting and tax software which is far more sophisticated than Turbo Tax, Quicken, Quick Books or what H&R Block uses. She is also studies like a mad woman and takes seminars to keep up on the deductions and all the tax changes.

[David M]

Originally Posted by Statica You should've .. (if I'd known your domain name sooner, I would've advised you) .. and if there is going to be further delay on your website going live .. you should be creating a very simple placeholder page on your webhosts site .. at least saying "coming soon" with tags and all that. Then done some site submissions. So at least you're site is not going to have to wait too long for robots to come by. Good luck with your site, Mary and David .. and "sort of what G said" .. you are going to need a lot more than just the website to get traffic or results from the site .. you need to optimize your site well .. create "clever" content on the site etc etc. Feel free to PM me if you want suggestions. For all ya know, this tax season might be so successful that you may not need the help of the stinkin' internet with all the other promotions and good business you spread in the community

Thank's for the encouragement. Mary gets worried sick about all the money we have spent doing this and about eventually quitting her job if and when business picks up. It's quite a leap off a cliff...hoping the parachute works.

I'm not too worried about the web crawlers not finding us now...I just want them to find the site when it goes live.

I'm interested in all the ideas you have about improving the website and increasing its search engine rankings.

[Rossua]

I had a quick look, its quite good for a starting site, and you can always refine it later.

A couple of points though, regarding Search Engine Rankings in the major search engines you MUST change the title tag, as this is used as a primary indicator as to the relevance of the site for given keyword search terms. The title of the home page should contain the main keywords relevant to the site, eg.

'Accounting, Tax Services, Divorce Agreements, Alameda CA, NAEA Certified'

Search engines currently look at the first 65-70 characters in the page title.

Also H1 tags in the web page influence the search rankings, so they should contain your main keywords/phrases also.

You should also add a Meta Description tag eg :-

meta name="description" content="We provide a full range of Accounting and Tax Services to the small-business and individual ....NAEA certified ... etc"

(content field up to around 160 characters).

This is displayed in the actual search results and will affect your 'click-through rate', as it is what people will see. It should contain your main keywords, (these are bolded in the search results).

Also you will need to gain some good quality inbound links, called 'link juice' in SEO parlance. These can come from local business directories or business/financial advice sites, (you could for example submit an article to one of them to get your name out). BUT at all costs avoid getting links from 'link farms' or any other untrustworthy sources, as this may cause your site to be removed from the search engine rankings completely.

Good quality and relevant links from trusted and authoritative sources are very important in gaining search rankings. When someone types in 'Accounting services Alameda' in Google - you want your site to come up near the top of the list - though the more competition there is for search terms the harder this will be. Ultimately you can pay to get listed - ie. in the Paid Search Results section that's highlighted at the top or side of the 'organic' search results list.

If you want to get reviews on a site before 'going live' you can simply configure the site to require authentication. I note your site is hosted on an Apache server. You can require authentication with Apache on any directory in your site (and hence all its sub-directories) by placing an '.htaccess' file in that directory and adding to it the following :-


AuthType Basic
AuthName "Accounting Service"
AuthBasicProvider file
AuthUserFile /home/mywebhostingaccount/.htpasswds/passwords
Require user user1 user2


(change file/path names as appropriate)

Then user names 'user1' and 'user2' can access the site if they enter the correct passwords, and no-one else will have access.

To create the password file get 'htpasswd' command line utility that comes with Apache (located in 'bin' directory).

Then :-

htpasswd -c passwords user1
(-c => create new file)
enter pswd = abcde2
htpasswd passwords user2
enter pswd = fghij2


Then upload this 'password' file to the web server (eg, in the above example, upload to /home/mywebhostingaccount/.htpasswds/), and also upload .htaccess to the required directory you wish to protect.

In this way you can protect only certain directories, whilst leaving others open to all.

To remove the protection on a sub-directory of a protected parent directory add the following to the .htaccess file for that sub-directory :-


Satisfy Any
Allow from all


When you want to make the site available to all, you can remove the .htaccess files, or comment out the lines with a '#' at the start of each line.

Check Authentication, Authorization and Access Control - Apache HTTP Server for the details.

For the .htaccess to work the AllowOverride setting on the directory where you wish to use it must be configured to allow the types of configuration you wish to use (the default allows all types).

Note file names are often case-sensitive on web servers as they are usually running Linux/Unix. Also incorrect file permissions are a common source of problems.

Note your web host may offer an automatic way to set up the above authorizations.

One last point on your site is that I would put the About Me section as the last item on the navigation bar, maybe like a CV where Interests & Personal Info come at the end.

HTH

[David M]

Wow... Most of this I don't understand the full meaning of right now but I am definitely going to research this.

Thanks so much HTH.

David

[Jbc223456]

Like Roossua said, you can use meta tags and keywords in order for search engines to recognize the website. Keywords like Accounting, Business Accounting, Personal Accounting, and California would be keywords to be put into the meta tags. Basically makes search engines make more connections to your website.

[David M]

Thank's much Jb.


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www.marymorganaccounting.com