Web design for accountants: written for the person deciding.

Somebody who has outgrown their current accountant, fallen behind, or started a business and realised they need one. All three are slightly embarrassed, and all three are checking whether you will be easy to talk to.

This is the thing practice websites get most wrong. They are written to demonstrate expertise, when the reader has already assumed you are qualified and is looking for something else entirely.

What they are looking for is whether you deal with businesses like theirs, whether they will get a person or a call centre, and roughly what it will cost. Those three questions decide it and most practice sites answer none of them.

The embarrassment matters more than it sounds. A person two years behind on their returns is scanning for any sign they will be judged, and a page full of compliance language reads exactly that way.

A practice that says it works with tradies, or medical practices, or property investors, converts far better than one that says it works with businesses. Specificity is the whole mechanism, and almost no practice site uses it.

The fear is obvious and it is the reason it does not happen. Naming a specialty feels like turning away everybody else. In practice it does the opposite, because a reader who sees their own situation described assumes you understand it.

There is a ranking argument for the same thing. Accountant for tradies, accountant for medical practices and accountant for property investors are real searches with almost no competition, and a general services page competes for none of them.

What the reader is actually trying to establish

• Do you work with people like me.

  The single strongest signal on the page, and the one most sites avoid making.

• Will I speak to a person.

  Naming the actual people, with photographs, does more than any amount of describing the service.

• Roughly what does it cost.

  Not a full price list. A shape, so they know whether to ring.

Most practice websites say nothing about fees, on the reasoning that it depends. It does depend, and saying nothing at all still costs work, because a reader with no idea whether you are affordable simply does not ring.

The version that works is not a price list. It is a range, or a starting point, or a plain statement that a first conversation costs nothing and produces a fixed quote. Any of those answers the question enough for somebody to act.

The practices that resist this hardest are usually the ones losing the most enquiries to it. Silence about price does not read as premium. It reads as expensive and awkward to ask about.

There is a filtering benefit too. A practice that indicates its shape stops fielding calls from people it was never going to work with, which in a busy July is worth something on its own.

A page for each type of client you want more of, a page for each service that carries real work, a genuine about page with the people on it, and something that answers the fee question. Not much more than that.

The services page listing eighteen items is the most common structure and the least effective one. It competes for nothing and it tells the reader nothing they had not assumed.

The about page matters more for a practice than for almost any other business, because the decision is a decision about trust in specific people. Photographs of the actual team, with names, and something human about each.

What to leave out

• Stock images of handshakes and skylines.

  They appear on ten thousand accounting sites and they signal that nothing on this page is specific.

• A wall of compliance language.

  It reassures nobody and it confirms the anxious reader's fear that this will be uncomfortable.

• A blog that stopped in 2022.

  Two old posts about the budget make a practice look inactive, which is worse than having no blog.