IMGCAP(1)]Spring is in the air, and with the first tender shoots emerging from the earth comes the irresistible urge to purge the garage, clean up the yard and wash the curtains.
While you’re spring cleaning at home, why not do the same for your business? That’s right, it’s the season for some maintenance and a springtime tidying up of your accounting firm’s website.
This needn’t involve backbreaking labor or take an inordinate amount of time. It’s just good practice to stay on top of things to make sure your site is as safe and current as it should be. Think of it as planting tulips and tuning up that long-idle air conditioning. Ready?
• Check your site for compatibility with all browsers. This is something that was done (or should have been) when it was first built so it’s merely a bit of reassurance that nothing has changed. Sometimes sites that were optimized for a particular browser have a way of losing that perfection over time. Simply visit your firm’s website, clicking around to check out different pages and documents using all the major browsers: Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer, Mozilla, Opera, Safari and K-Meleon ought to cover it. Make sure pages render correctly and everything looks nice.
• Monitor your mobile-friendly status. This is another easy task; you’re just checking up on what is probably working fine already. But with so many people using mobile devices to conduct their business research, it’s important that you know your site is welcoming them with an easy-to-use, fully optimized interface.
• Update website features. This is very important! It often goes overlooked, and when that happens your site becomes an easy target for hackers. Save time and trouble by performing this relatively easy maintenance before there’s a problem. Check for updates to plug-ins, themes and everything else that might need to be refreshed. While you’re at it, consider changing logins and passwords, using combinations that are hard to guess, to make sure only authorized users have access.
• Proofread the entire site. Spend the time to give your site a thorough once-over, scanning for typos, outdated bios, areas you’d like to update or highlight, pages to add and contact information that should be changed. Things change over time. Even a great website that isn’t very old may contain data that doesn’t reflect the current status of your team’s talents and status.
• Check links to external pages. It’s frustrating to click on a promising link and find yourself at an error message, dead page or one that’s been taken over by spam. Follow all the links on your site that lead to external locations and make sure they still lead to active, appealing destinations.
And you’re done! Hopefully it wasn’t too difficult, but even if you ran into significant issues it’s better to have found and fixed them than to not know and let potential clients find them. Your site is all spiffed up and ready to welcome visitors. If you uncovered some major work, don’t hesitate to reach out to someone to help take care of the heavy lifting. With so many people using websites to judge the professionalism of potential accounting partners, it’s not something you can ignore. Next: cleaning the gutters!
Sarah Warlick, content director at
