Advanced
Internet
for CPAs
MACPA 2002
Technology Conference
December 5, 2002
1:20am to 3:00am
J. Carlton Collins, CPA
Accounting Software Advisor
www.accountingsoftwareadvisor.com
carlton@accountingsoftwareadvisor.com
770.734.0950
Advanced Internet for CPAs
Sample Web Sites
Te following web sites offer an opportunity to learn about various techniques and strategies employed throughout the web.
1. Traffic Cameras in Atlanta (contains live cameras scattered throughout Atlanta’s Interstates) All Traffic Cameras on one screen
2. Hubble Space Telescope Picture of the day (Contains new pictures posted daily from the Hubble space telescope) Hubble Space Telescope Archives
3. 600 Live Cameras (Contains public live cameras all over the world)
Web Cam - Maui
WebCam Lahina (Cheeseburger in Paradise)
WebCam at Lionshead Gondola - Vail, Co
WebCam at San Francisco (Fairmont Hotel)
4. Learn to Speak a Foreign Language (Here 1,000 common phrases in 70 different languages)
5. Radio Stations around the world (Listen to radio stations all over the world)
6. Police Scanners (Listen to selected police scanners in the United States)
7. Download Smash Mouth's Rock Star (Example MP3 file you can download from the web)
8. NetMeeting (Talk live to others on the Internet. This is the software application I use to talk to my home office)
9. Who's on First? (Listen to this famous comic classic)
10. Nintendo – Pokemon (Information to help you choose and play)
11. Card Trick (Be prepared to be bewildered)
12. Solving the Rubiks Cube (Learn how to solve the Rubics cube using VRML technology)
13. Connect Four Game (Let’s play)
14. Disney - Inspector Gadget game (Among many other activities)
15. Tickle Me Elmo Site (Games and tickle fun)
16. Track an Airplane in Flight (This web site is tied in directly with the FAA’s real-time traffic information)
17. Honolulu Dinosaur Museum (I’ve actually visited this museum – to my surprise it was a closet in a dormitory)
18. United States Treasury
$50 Questions Game
Face Flips Game
19. Unclaimed Money (Do you have big money waiting for you?)
Go to the Unclaimed Money Search Site
20. Search Engine – Hotbot (A much better search engine than Yahoo!. For example, searching for the word “magazines” yields more than 2,500,000 hits while Yahoo! Finds only 1,100 hits)
21. Search Engine – Yahoo (Not a very good search engine, but has a good menu design and kids site.
22. Search Engine – Lycos - Multi-media
23. World Population Clock (How many people are only the planet?)
24. Poster of US Women's Soccer Team (Answer questions and receive a free poster)
25. National Geographic
26. Green Peace Kids
27. Yahooligans for Kids
28. Amazon.com
29. Wal-Mart
30. The Louvre in Paris, France - The Monna Lisa
31. The White House (White House for kids)
32. Newspapers - 10,000 of them
33. Thomas (congressional records)
34. Real Estate Agent Example
Developing an Effective Web Site
Today, building a web page is as easy as choosing “File Save As” from the main menu. Most of today’s applications will save your document automatically to a web page format (HTML format). By far, the most difficult parts of creating an effective web site is organization, layout, and content. Your approach will depend on your objective. For example, if your web site is intended for use on the Internet to attract new customers, you may have a different strategy than the Information Systems person who is posting a corporate web site internally on the Intranet. As a starter, let us assume you want to attract new customers and sell products or services over the Internet.
You could start by considering the old “company brochure”. This document was used to describe the company and summarize the products or services sold. Now imagine that your brochure is one of two thousand similar brochures on display at the airport available to arriving passengers. How is your brochure going to catch their attention over the other 1999 brochures? What if your brochure is difficult to read because the font is too small, too large or busy? Where is your brochure located on the display? – at eye level, or on the bottom row? This image paints a similar image of the problems associated with creating an effective web site. This session features a discussion of some strategies you can employ to make your web site as effective as possible.
Designing Your Web Site
The design and layout of an effective web site can become quite confusing - especially over time as the web site is improved on an ad hoc basis. For this reason, you should approach your web site design in an organized manner. Your first step might be to use a large grease board of poster board to sketch out your general desired layout – complete with arrows to indicate links. For example, your initial rough draft may look like the following:
Once you have sketched out the basic design of your web site, the next step is assign persons to develop the content for each site. This content can be developed in any standard word processor, spreadsheet or database application. However, once you begin to actually develop your web site, it is highly recommended that you use a common web page development tool such as Netscape Navigator or Microsoft Front Page. These web page development tools not only provide tools for developing web pages, but also contain tools that make it far easier to develop and manage a web site on an ongoing basis. Microsoft Front Page is discussed later in these session materials.
Building Your Web Page
A few years ago, building a web page involved the use of complicated HTML (Hyper-Text Markup Language) tools such as HTML Editor or HotMetal Editor. These tools were relatively difficult to learn, complicated to use, and contained many limitations such as the inability to edit in WYSIWYG mode. In addition, many of these tools imposed a serious limitation on the size of the web page itself. Today, the process of developing a web page has been made much easier with the introduction of numerous new web development tools and the addition of HTML file format support in the popular word processing packages. Many of today’s word-processing, desktop publishing, spreadsheet, and database packages support HTML file formats. This makes the creation of a web page as simple as saving the file to the HTML format. As an example, this chapter entitled "Creating & Posting a Web Page" could be transferred into a web page simply by selecting File Save As HTML from the Microsoft Word menu as follows:
Word XP saves files to an HTML file format. Most other products such as Microsoft Publisher, PowerPoint, Excel, WordPerfect, Quark, and even many accounting software packages can do the same thing
This action saves the file to the proper HTML format ready for uploading to a web server. Even the pictures, screen captures, and graphic images included in this file would be converted to GIF images.
Of course, the creative side of web development remains to be a difficult obstacle for many business people. In the past, your company has probably called in a graphic artist or other specialist to help prepare your company brochure. These creative people typically have a flair for creating vivid products that catch the eye and convey professionalism. These specialists also have access to better desktop publishing equipment such as scanners, color printers, and photographic equipment. This puts them in a better position to develop brochures and print media. The development of web pages generally calls for the same skill set. Therefore, while generating your own home page is relatively easy, producing an attractive web page that conveys the right look may require the use of a professional.
Sophisticated Web Development Tools
Today there are dozens of great web page development tools on the market. Over the past four years, the web page development tool that seems to consistently rank at or near the top of the pack is Microsoft's FrontPage XP. You can learn more about FrontPage and even download a demonstration copy of this software from the Microsoft web site as shown below:
For what it is worth, here at Accounting Software Advisor, we use FrontPage to manage our various web sites.
Basically, FrontPage includes 3 distinct components:
1) Web Site Creation Tools - An HTML editor to build and edit Web pages;
(a) Web site creation wizards
(b) Web page editing tool
(c) Built-in web themes
2) Web Site Management Tool - called FrontPage Explorer;
(a) Renaming pages automatically updates all relevant hyperlinks
(b) Hyperlink analyzer tools displays all broken hyperlinks
(c) Reports
3) Web server software so you can run and test your web site from your own desktop machine.
The FrontPage Editor
This editor allows you to build and edit web pages using a WYSIWYG interface. You don't have to know HTML code. Rather, you simply type the text you want and paste in the graphics as if you were using a standard Windows word processor. FrontPage Editor creates the HTML code automatically. If you want to work directly with the HTML code you can but it is generally not necessary except when you are editing Web pages created by another HTML editor. The Editor provides the following user tools:
Insert Options:
|
Break |
Horizontal Lines |
Date and Time |
Excel Spreadsheets |
|
Excel Pivot Tables |
Charts |
Hit Counter |
Hover Buttons |
|
Marquees |
Include Pages |
Schedule Pictures |
Categories |
|
Search Forms |
Table of Contents |
Banner Ads |
Confirmation Fields |
|
Scheduled Include Pages |
Substitutions |
One Line Text Boxes |
Scrolling Text Boxes |
|
Check Boxes |
Radio Buttons |
Drop Down Boxes |
Push Buttons |
|
Pictures |
Labels |
Forms |
HTML |
|
Java Applets |
ActiveX Controls |
Plug Ins |
Clip Art |
|
Images |
Video |
Hyperlinks |
Comments |
|
Symbols |
Navigation |
Page Banners |
Files |
|
Book Marks |
Tables |
Frames |
|
Format Options:
|
Font |
Paragraph |
Bullets and Numbering |
Borders and Shading |
|
Dynamics HTML Effects |
Position |
Style |
Style Sheet Links |
|
Themes |
Shared Borders |
Page Transitions |
Backgrounds |
Other Noteworthy Tools:
|
Spell Check |
Thesaurus |
Security Permissions |
Recalculate Hyperlinks |
|
Macros |
Visual Basic Editor |
Macro Script Editor |
Add-ins |
|
Search and Replace |
Publish Web |
Import Web |
Task Manager |
FrontPage Explorer
The FrontPage Explorer is a site management tool that allows you to view your entire site from three different perspectives – folder view, hyperlink view, and file view (samples of these views are shown below).
Once you have developed your web site, FrontPage Explorer makes it fairly easy to publish your updated site to a remote server and check all of the links in your site. The "publishing" and "check hyperlinks" dialog boxes are shown below:
Selected FrontPage Features
¨ You can draw WYSIWYG tables freehand as easily as you would using a pencil and paper, making columns, rows, and cells of varying sizes and shapes to custom fit your content.
¨ Build web pages using WYSIWYG frames editing. You can create and modify frames and framesets in the FrontPage Editor as well as view and edit Web pages within any frame.
¨ Wizards are provided to help make creating new pages or entire Web sites easier. Simply answer a few questions, and wizards will do the rest for you.
¨ Templates are also provided to help you generate web sites or pages from predefined formats. To use templates, simply replace the generated content with your own words, images, and ideas.
¨ Components such as "Save to E-mail" help eliminate the need to write your own programs. FrontPage's drop-in commands make it fairly easy to add interactive functionality. For example, you can drop in a "submit form" component that captures information from visitors to your web page, and then e-mails the results to your e-mail address.
¨ FrontPage Automatically generates navigation bars on any Web page in the FrontPage Editor.
¨ FrontPage's themes and themes views give your web site a high-quality, consistent look. You can choose from more than 50 professionally designed thematic templates that include backgrounds, fonts, page headers, and navigation buttons, or assign a theme to any individual Web page to vary only that page's look.
¨ FrontPage provides graphical bullets and other custom images to use in place of the bullets normally found on Web pages.
¨ FrontPage's Banner Ad Manager and Dynamic HTML support offer several options that handle rotating information in your Web site, or adding dynamic Web content such as text that "flies" onto your page from off-screen!
¨ Java™ applet, ActiveX™ controls, and browser plug-in support are included in FrontPage.
¨ An Import Wizard can import existing files or existing web site content directly from the World Wide Web.
¨ The database region wizard and active server pages allow you to link dynamic database content directly to your Web pages. This feature allows users to perform dynamic database queries to your site over the Web.
¨ Advanced features allow you to add text directly over images, making graphical button creation easier. You could also create cool animation effects on your button-shaped images so that when a user "hovers" over or clicks on the button, it changes color or shape, or animates the button.
Get
Found! 
In posting a web page, the first problem to overcome is being found on the Internet. To play this game properly, you need to understand exactly how search engines index your web pages and rate them. The specific algorithms used to rank the web pages found in a search vary from one search engine to another, and even vary within the same search engine over time. However in general, if all of your search words are contained in the title of the found web site, that site is generally ranked extremely high. If only a portion of your search words are contained in the title, then the resulting rank is a little lower. If your search words are contained only in the keyword list, then the resulting ranking is still a little lower. If the search words are contained only in the body of the home page, then the resulting ranking is still lower. If the search words are contained in sub pages (this applies to some, but not all search engines), then the resulting rank is lower still. In the event that search words are contained in the title, keyword list, home page and sub pages, an algorithm is used to calculate the resulting rank based on some allocation method.
In the example below, a user has used the AltaVista engine to search for “Corporate Tax Consulting” which resulted in over 399,000 hits. The top hit was Robert Half, CPA’s web site – primarily because this site contains the words searched in the title, key word list, and the home page.
This screen shows the keywords for this web page:
From this simple example we can learn a few things. First, you don’t need an elaborate and complex web page to rank high in a search, you simply need to make sure that your web page has precisely the right title and keywords. Unless your company is one-dimensional, there is no way that you can do this with just one web site. Therefore, to be effective, you may need to create a web site for every service you offer. This concept is discussed further below. The second thing we learn is that it may be beneficial to first test your title against the various Internet search engines before you finalize it. You can usually tell by the resulting rankings of the top hits whether your intended title will sort higher on the list.
Conclusion: Choose an appropriate title for your web page. Choose appropriate keywords. Make sure all of the relevant buzz words are included in the body of your home page.
Get
Chosen 
Just because you made it to the top of a hit list from a search engine does not mean the user is going to click on your site. You need to make sure your web page summary is well written and to the point. The screen below shows the summaries for just a few of the Corporate Tax Consulting links we hit in the example above. Notice how none of these summaries indicate that they are experts in the area of Corporate Tax Consulting. As a result, the user many continue to scroll down the hit list until it finds a hit that is most relevant to the search. Some search engines require the user to provide a summary at the time the URL is submitted to the search engine while other simply use the first few lines of text in the home page as the summary. Either way, you want your summary read as if it is right on point with the users needs. As mentioned above, it is impossible to accomplish this with just one web page. To be effective, you must create a specific web page for every service or product (group) your company offers. The good news is that it cost very little extra in terms of hard dollars to create 50 web pages compared to just one web page. Only time and effort is involved.
Conclusion: Your summary should be well written and to the point to attract prospects to your site.
Don’t Chase the Prospect Away 
Let us assume that your web page has ranked high in a search list and the user has clicked on your link. You can inadvertently chase them away if you make them wait too long for the web page. Common mistakes are locating your web page on a slow web server (such as those provided by America Online); adding large graphic images that take too long to load, adding background music that slows down the loading process, and making the web page difficult to read. Your web page should get right to the point without a lot of hype. Often a short introductory summary followed by a well-designed menu of links is the best way to pull someone into your page. The information should not be buried too deep in the web site – if a user feels that they are on a tiger hunt for the information they are seeking, they may leave your web site altogether. Other mistakes include fonts that are too small, fonts that are too large, backgrounds that make it tough to read the text, and formatting that does not work well with a wide variety of browsers.
Conclusion: A clean, fast web site will help keep the prospect interested in exploring your web pages. Don’t get too fancy on the home page – for example link to impressive slower movies and voice in sub pages and warn the user by advising them how big the files are so they can judge whether they want to wait for this information.
Don’t Hide Your Company Info 
Some web pages make it virtually impossible to find the company name, address, telephone and e-mail information. Our advice is to add this information to the bottom of every web page you create. With this approach, the moment the user decides that they would like to contact you, your information will be close at hand.
Content, Content, Content 
Sometimes it pays to give away the farm in order for the cows to come running. If your web site provides only sales information and no answers to common questions, no insights, no examples, and no hints, tips or war stories, then it may be less effective. A person searching for a International tax consultant would spend a great deal of time on your page if it contained links to the following:
Click here for the “Top Ten International Tax Planning Mistakes” corporations make.
Click here for four cases studies featuring tax planning strategies for a small, medium, large and Fortune 500 company.
Click here to read about several fraudulent tax strategies that some consultants employ that could land you in jail.
Click here to read about current bills in congress which could affect your International tax planning strategy.
Click here for more good links to International Tax Planning Information on the Web.
Certainly an interested party would spend time reading and printing this material – another good reason to have your name and address on every page. The idea is to provide such a good site for relevant information that the user bookmarks your site so they can easily come back to it. After all, how many times has a person found a good site, and then later was unable to find that site again.
Keep your Web Site Current
For most web sites, it is easy to tell when a web site is out of date. After a while, telltale signs such as an old date or a reference to an obsolete topic make your web page feel like a ghost town. For the best results, you should consider adding at least some current information weekly (or even daily) to your web site.
Deep Information
Your web site can contain almost an infinite amount of information for almost no additional cost. For this reason, you should supply the user with as much “well organized” information as possible. For example, consider posting a 5-page biography for each officer or Partner in your organization. Consider adding pictures of all employees to your web site in an effort to help the user associate a face with your company. Add a complete history of the company, information on every product and information on all of your services. Reference letters can be a great addition as users can view those letters without necessarily bothering the person who wrote you the reference.
Include Prices
While some people may disagree, we think it is a good idea to clearly state your fees and prices for products and services. People on the web are often shopping around for the best price available. With no price to go on, they may not give your site further consideration. Some companies report to have even received e-mail complaining that because no pricing is included, the sender has elected not to do business with that company. Because web users use the web 24 hours a day, it may be unreasonable to expect them to be able to call easily to obtain prices. On the other hand, it may be dangerous to allow your competitors to see your prices.
Multiple Web Pages 
Perhaps the most important step you should take is to develop multiple web sites to represent each product or service you sell. For example, a given CPA firm might have a web site devoted exclusively to individual tax preparation, another for Pension and Profit Sharing, another for Corporate tax, write-up services, systems work, etc. This will allow you to design a web site that will come across as right on point for the user searching for your particular service or product.
Posting Your Web Page 
Once you have developed your Web Home Page (and sub pages), the next step is to simply copy your files to a web server somewhere in the world. There are thousands of web servers who would be happy to host your web page for a small monthly charge ranging usually from $5.00 to $50.00 per month. Here is how it works:
1. While it is not absolutely necessary, as a practical matter you will want to create your own Domain Name. This is done simply with your own creative brain matter – testing your possible names to make sure they have not already been taken. The cost is $usually $15 to 70 per every two years.
2. Contact the Internet Service Provider (ISP) of your choice and establish an account. Your ISP will create a new folder on their web server specifically for you and your data. Your ISP will also provide you with the proper IP address to the web server as well as a password that will enable you to access, edit or upload new files to the web server at any time during the day or night. Your ISP will set up the domain name for you.
3. Next, use the publishing tool in your web site software program (ie: Microsoft FrontPage 2000) to publish your web site to the Internet. During the routine, you will be asked to provide your user name and password.
Please note that there are thousands of Internet Service Providers (ISP) who would be willing to host your web page. In selecting an ISP, you should consider the following:
Submitting Your Web Site to Web Search Engines
Once your web page is up and running, you want the world to be able to find it. You perform this step by “Submitting” your URL to the various popular search engines. As an example, to update the AltaVista search engine, go to the AltaVista Web Page and click the “Add a URL” button as shown in the screen capture below:
The Google Search Engine and the “Submit Your URL” Button
This button will take you to a form that will allow you to list up to ten URLs. Within the next week, Google will “index” your web page and key words. Thereafter, users of the Internet may (or may not) find your web page by keying in search criteria that match your key words. The reason that they may not find you is simply because of volume. Assume for example that one of your key words is “magazine”. On November 12, 2002, a search for the key word “magazine” resulted in 26,800,000 web pages that contained that word.
Of course, most users would refine their search. For example, let us assume that a user were to search for the words “goat magazine”. This search resulted in only 543 web pages that contain this exact phrase. Therefore, if these two words were part of your web page, you would have a much higher probability that someone will find your web page.
Keep in mind that there are also services available that will submit your URLs on your behalf for a fee. For example, SUBMIT-IT.COM is the Microsoft web site that assists you in this function for a fee.
Advanced Design Techniques 
Aside from developing a great looking web page with text and graphic pictures, there are other measures you can take to spice up your page. One of the most popular advanced techniques is to add RealAudio to your web page. With real audio, wave files can be embedded directly on your web page. As the user accesses the real audio file, the real audio player buffers the first ten seconds of the file, and then begins playing the wave stream. The result is that sound starts fairly quickly and continues playing uninterrupted.
In order to produce a RealAudio file, you must first purchase the RealAudio Server software that is available via download from http://www.realaudio.com. The price of the RealAudio server depends on the maximum number of simultaneous streams users can listen to from your site. To support 5, 20, or 100 simultaneous users, the RealAudio license fee is $495, $1,895, and $8,495 respectively. All server packages come with 90 days free support. In order to listen to RealAudio files, users must first download the RealAudio Player that is available free from http://www.realaudio.com.
Another method which is gaining popularity is to add video clips to your web page. Similar to wave files, the video clips contain both a wave file for sound, and video clips that can play movies. To view these video clips requires a video clip viewer such as Quicktime for Mac or Windows or the Multi-Media viewer included in Windows 2000 called Media Player.
Characteristics of A Successful Web Page
· No Invisible Webs. It is difficult sometimes to find web pages in the haystack of the Internet. To keep the site from being invisible, it has been registered with all of the online search engines like Lycos, Google, Wisenut, iWON, InfoSeek, etc. and with the catalog listings such as EINet Galaxy, Yahoo, the Commercial Sites Index, etc. In addition, the registrations are kept up to date with new categories and new sites.
· No Dead Webs. Some Web pages have a "ghost-town" feel about them because it seems as if no one has been tending them in a while. On good sites, the content is always fresh -- there are no pages where no one has put any new information for months.
· Successful pages are information-rich, so the site offers good content, content, content.
· Good, clear navigation around and through the site is a must. The navigational elements (icons, arrows, etc.) are consistent and moving around on the page and among the pages feels intuitive --- you can see where you are going, and return easily.
· The site has true value added: services, content, products, resources. It is not just a place to market and sell. Users can get real information and services for free.
· The site maintainers are responsive -- they answer queries and trouble shoot problem links. You don't get the dreaded: "404, URL not found" messages that mean that the document you are hunting for is not there.
· The site has organizational and/or institutional support. This means that the site is not set up by guys "out back" where no one else in the organization knows anything about the site. The site has budget and personnel support.
· The site is capable of gathering information about visitors through contests, newsletters, surveys, etc. so that the maintainers know who has been visiting the site.
· The site is viewable with a variety of browsers
· There are text and small image alternatives for large images
· Interactivity with people is available
· The site has consistent imagery and content from page to page
Web Development Tips:
· Test your pages on multiple platforms before you release them to the world. What may look wonderful on Netscape may look horrible on an AOL, Macintosh, or UNIX Mosaic browser.
· To control the look of your web page across multiple browsers, wrap all of your text in tables and set the tables to a specified width in terms of pixels (say 596 pixels wide).
· Your server logs are a gold mine of information. For example, you can see at the percentage of the users that are loading the pages but not the images in the pages. You can also see the pages have never or rarely been accessed.
· Don't wait for people to tell you that there are problems. Most people who find a problem with your web site go away without saying a thing. Check your own page regularly.
· Don't use long titles (such as ones that wrap around) - Remember that the title goes into the hotlist, where display space is limited.
· Always use text with images that are links. It can be frustrating to encounter a home page that is a series of images without a single word on the entire page.
· Have each topic represented by a single web page. However, if you have a large number of topics, maintaining and linking them can be a daunting task. Consider combining smaller, related topics onto a single page instead. But don't go overboard and put everything on one page; your reader still has to download your document over the Net. It can be better to have several medium sized pages (say, the size of two to ten pages in your word processor) than to have one monolithic page or hundreds of little tiny pages.
· While some individuals may have a dozen different image viewers link to their browser, most don't. Your pictures are more likely to be viewed if you make them in, or convert them to, one of the popular image types such as GIF, JPG, or PCX.
Web Page Design Secrets - A Summary
1. Instead of just one web site, create a separate web site for every service or product your company offers.
2. Include a ton of useful content related to the subject of your web page (articles, tips, hints, real life case studies, evidence of expertise, references, etc.)
3. Put your company name, address, phone, and e-mail address on the bottom of every page.
4. Include the most relevant words possible in your web page title.
5. Include links to all sub pages on your web page (so they will be indexed by the search engines)
6. Include a clever list of keywords when submitting your web pages.
7. Submit your web pages to as many search engines as possible.
8. Avoid using large graphic images and files that will cause your web page to load too slowly.
9. Avoid busy backgrounds that make your web page difficult to read.
10. Resist the urge to create a busy web site loaded with different fonts, colors and images. Simplistic web pages that load fast and are easier to read attract more attention.
11. Make sure your web pages are loaded on a fast server (ie: not on an AOL server).
12. Test your web page using a variety of browsers and monitor sizes to see how they come across to others. Modify as needed.
13. Test search engines frequently to see how high your site ranks compared to others. Adjust your site accordingly.
14. Include information about the owners of the business (including pictures) so that the user will feel more comfortable by associating a face with the web site.
15. Capture information regarding the number of hits you have received. Investigate any dramatic changes in these hits.
16. Work hard to convince appropriate sites to link to your site.
17. Interview people who have visited your site in an effort to gain feedback.
18. Consider having a professional graphic artist develop a “look” for your web site.
19. Consider adding audio and/or video files to your web page to help convey information and expertise.
Key Site Management Tasks
1. Keep the Content Current
This is perhaps the most challenging and time consuming part of a Webmaster's task. It's easy to develop new and exciting content, but as that content grows you also to have to