If your website is starting to appear a little old-fashioned you should recognize that your firm's image is being hurt without good cause. Even if you have an aging accounting website design, you will be able to locate tons of tools and gadgets online to dress it up. Lot's of companies are giving away awesome free content on the web so you don't have to order or pay for most of it. Let's examine your "Contact" page as an example.

Many website owners are still relying on some pretty old fashioned Contact pages. One dead giveaway that you either can't or don't bother to keep up with changing technology is a lack of dynamic driving directions. A map isn't good enough any more. Everybody has a map these days. You want real, dynamic driving directions. You can get a free driving directions gadget from Google. This is a small form you can put on your "Contact" page that will allow visitors to type in their current address and get instant, personalized, and printable directions to your office. This can save you money by cutting down on phone calls to your office for driving directions. Here is a breakdown of how to get it up and running.

First generate the code. Google will generate it for you. Go to the Google driving directions gadget page and click the button that says "Add Gadget to Your Site".

This will open a new page. Select a border style that matches your accounting website design. Now, change the destination address from the Mountain View, CA default address (Google's main office) to the address of your accounting firm. In the destination field, after your address, put your firm name in parenthesis. Now preview your gadget.

The preview is at the top of the page and shows you exactly what the gadget will look like on your site. Very slick, yes? If your firm name is particularly long it may not fit in the space available. If you need to you can increase the width to make it fit. Once you have the gadget looking the way you want it to click the button that says, "Get the Code". The code will be generated automatically and it will appear at the bottom of the page. Copy this code and paste it into your website.

I understand a lot of us don't know how to use this code, so let me show you what you need to do. Most of us use content management systems with WYSIWYG (or "Rich Text") editors, so step one is to log in and navigate to the page you want to edit. You won't be able to paste this code into a rich text editor. In order to add the gadget to your site you'll need to access your pages source code. Don't panic! This is easier than it sounds.

Open the WYSIWYG editor for the page and mark the position where you want to place the widget by typing "XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX". The trick here is that even if you have no coding skills at all, you can still find a bunch of "X"s in the source code. Most editors will allow you to view and edit the source code. Look for a button or link that says "plain text", "html", "source", or "code". This link will change the page text and display it in code. Find the string of "X"s in the code. Paste the gadget code over the "X"s and save the page. Wasn't that easy? Now, if necessary, publish the site.

Having a map on your CPA website makes it that much easier for clients to find you. Now with the driving instructions gadget on your website you can save your customers time in figuring out just how to get to your office from virtually anywhere. There isn't any good reason that you can't have both of these features, and loads more, integrated into your accounting website design.