Add Driving Instructions to an Old Accounting Website Design Free of Charge

Is your accounting website seeming a little aged? It can be easy to ignore your website to the point that you start to appear as if you're unable or unwilling to stay apace with changing technology, and this can mar your company's image. It's absurdly simple to add contemporary content to even an aging accounting website design. For instance, do you have advanced driving directions on your "Contact" page?

Let's add some dynamic driving directions to your website. 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 is more than just a fun feature, and it does more tan make your website, and by extension you, look more technically advanced. It can even save you money by cutting down on phone time spent telling people how to find your office, especially if you're in a hard to find location. Here's how to set it up.

The first thing to do is get Google to generate the code for you. Go to the Google driving directions gadget page and click the button that says "Add Gadget to Your Site".

A new page will open with a short form that you can fill out to modify your gadget. For the most part the default settings are fine. 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 the name of your firm is too long for the available space increase the width of the gadget and preview it again. Once you have the gadget looking the way you want it to click the button that says, "Get the Code". A form window will appear at the bottom of the page. Copy this code and paste it into your website.

Most of us use content management systems with WYSIWYG, or "rich text" editors. 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". Press this and the window of your editor will change to show the actual source code for your page. Next find and highlight the string of "X"s and paste the gadget code over it. That's all there is to it.

For folks in and around town your map may well be enough for most of your clients to find you, but for folks new to the area it just having a map may not be good enough. If you really want to make it easy for prospects and clients to find you you'll need more. Now with the driving instructions gadget included you can save your patrons, current and prospective, time in figuring out precisely how to reach your business from anywhere. You are going to need these features incorporated into your accounting website design. With Google literally giving these goodies away isn't any acceptable reason not to give your customers and prospects personalized driving directions.

Article Source: http://www.abcarticledirectory.com

Kenny Marshall is a consultant and former Vice President of CPA Site Solutions, one of the country's most successful web companies dedicated solely to accounting website design.

Posted on 2011-03-02, By: Kenny Marshall *

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Note: The content of this article solely conveys the opinion of its author, Kenny Marshall