2012 Review of CPASiteSolutions CompleteWebSuite

CPASiteSolutions — CompleteWebSuite
www.CPASiteSolutions.com

From the April 2012 Review of Website Building Tools for Accounting Firms.

Best Fit: Firms that want a site from one the best template-based web builders along with comprehensive web marketing services, and firms that want to build a website quickly. CPASiteSolutions boasts that it only needs 15 minutes of a CPA’s time and that the dedicated webmaster often completes the site within 2 days.

Strengths

• 366 great templates to choose from, including smart designs which auto-recognize screen sizes and devices for a perfect fit (unique among products reviewed)
• Great point-and-click WYSIWYG editor makes it easy to add and format text. Essentially, changes are previewed as you make them on the page. Advanced users can use an HTML editor.
• New site styles, features, and upgrades are released almost monthly. As a result, the product is constantly improving.
• Newsletters contain a lot of content (10 articles each month) and are written by CPASiteSolutions’ team of CPAs and MBAs.
• The CPASiteSolutions website and online Help Center is full of answers to frequently asked questions, explanations, tutorials, videos, and web marketing ideas.

Potential Limitations

• In general, newsletters contain only national content (for example, they do not contain state-specific tax news). However, a firm can write its own newsletter.
• Firms looking to make modifications to the website style (the layout, for example) on their own will find it to be very restricted to the template and will need to contact CPASiteSolutions for changes.

CPASiteSolutions has been helping accountants create websites since it was founded in 1999. With a strong belief in constant and never-ending improvement, the company adds new designs and product enhancements nearly every month. After having evolved for 13 years, CPASiteSolutions’ impressive offering includes hundreds of professional designs, thousands of pages of content written by CPAs, and a long list of add-on features.

CPASiteSolutions is a good fit for both firms that want to enter content on their own or want to have all of the changes made for them. Firms will find the WYSIWYG editor very easy for making minor text edits. Firms that do not want any part of the website administration back-end can call or e-mail their assigned dedicated webmaster with a to-do list.

Search Engines

Users have complete control over the content, page titles and meta-tags to optimize them for the search engines. The software’s control panel provides detailed web traffic statistics available for every site powered by Webalizer. For Platinum level firms that want more detailed analysis, CPASiteSolutions provides services to set up a Google Analytics account, as well as help firms interpret the data and track lead conversion rates. The advanced search engine marketing services include Google pay-per-click submission and maintenance, local search marketing, and monthly search engine marketing coaching.

Domains

CPASiteSolutions helps its client firms with domain name acquisition, registration, renewal and transfers without charging any extra fees. The firm owns its unique domain name and has full control over it. There is no charge to a firm that leaves CPASiteSolutions, in fact, they help a leaving firm collect the data and prepare an e-mail for its departure.

Hosting

Websites are hosted on dedicated servers located in fully-redundant SAS 70 Type II certified data centers in Chicago and Houston with 99.9 percent connectivity. High-speed OC3, Tier-1 connections directly link these servers to the Internet. Each site comes with a client portal for document exchange that is 256-bit SSL encrypted.

Email

CPASiteSolutions provides 10 e-mail accounts with 7,500 MB of data each that are branded to the accounting firm for no additional charge. Firms are not required to use e-mail along with CPASiteSolutions’ other services and may maintain their own Exchange or other server. E-mail accounts come with the spam filtering and anti-virus protection. A web interface for e-mail is available, and CPASiteSolutions also helps firms set up e-mail access in Outlook and mobile devices.