The CPA Journal

June 2002

WebSite Redesign: When It’s Time for a Change

Aweb presence is now a must for almost any business. According to Mary Elges of Pinnacle Decision Systems (www.pinndec.com), a computer consulting and software development company, “The web has grown up so much in the last couple of years, with faster connection speeds, new development technologies and browser enhancements, [that] many of the older, static or frame developed websites now look outdated.” She offers the following suggestions for freshening up a website:

Clear look and feel. When the Internet first started, it was geared more toward technical people, and many early websites reflected that. The current standard is for a website to have a clean, understandable, and consistent look and feel.
Updated content. Update your content at least quarterly, if not more often. One of the worst mistakes to make is to allow your site to be static with no change. When someone visits your site a second time and sees that the information remains unchanged, chances are they will not come back.
Simple navigation. If you make your navigation difficult to follow, visitors will not only get frustrated and have problems finding information on your site, they also won’t return. Online users have become accustomed to a certain style of navigation and site structure that avoids confusion and allows them to easily take full advantage of the information available.
Not just text. Unlike the simple webpages of the Internet’s early days, today you need a hook to keep visitors coming back for more. This can be done by incorporating newer technologies such as Macromedia Flash, motion graphics, news feeds, and other ideas so that the site never gets stale. Strike a balance between design and content so users with slower connections or older equipment don’t get frustrated.
Make it interactive. An attractive website can be an expensive proposition, but there are ways to provide low-cost interactivity. For example, design a member portion of the website for newsletters and forums, or create a database for visitors to log personal information.
Optimize for search engines. If a website isn’t properly coded, the search engines’ spiders will never find it, and neither will visitors. Pay attention to the code, especially webpage titles, when redesigning a site.

Elges says that a redesign is more than a matter of fixing problems. She recommends approaching website redesign with the same strategic planning used with other marketing materials:

Budget. First figure out how much money is available. A complex site, with many pages and a lot of interactivity, will be more expensive. Databases and custom graphics, which can make a website unique, also cost more.
Know the audience. Knowing the website’s target audience affects its look and the technologies employed. For example, the website for a company that provides information to a broad audience needs to look and function consistently in all of the major browsers and be fast enough to be downloaded by the slowest. The visitors to the website of a business-to-business company, on the other hand, probably use broadband connections, so the website can use graphics and new technologies more intensively.
Content management. A website’s complexity is a big factor in its ongoing maintenance. Elges’ company has designed sites for companies that let the clients maintain their own content through databases, web-based forms, and other tools, but she points out that such decisions need to be addressed before starting to build the site.

Elges’ final recommendation is to take the time to choose the right person or company to do the redesign project. She doesn’t recommend in-house website design: “Since today’s standard website goes far beyond brochureware and static displays, you really need a professional to make sure that it’s designed and coded for optimum performance.

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The CPA Journal is broadly recognized as an outstanding, technical-refereed publication aimed at public practitioners, management, educators, and other accounting professionals. It is edited by CPAs for CPAs. Our goal is to provide CPAs and other accounting professionals with the information and news to enable them to be successful accountants, managers, and executives in today's practice environments.

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