How to Make High-Quality Videos on Effective Websites For Accountants

A Professional Videographer is an Excellent Choice

Using a specialized video crew makes certain you’ll get an excellent website video. It also makes certain that the message it conveys is well-defined and concise. In order for people to take your firm seriously, you must make a video that stages your business in a a genuine way. Your home page should have a video that introduces your CPA firm. It is a good idea to carve out a budget for a professional videographer. What is your business service offering? You can add a lot of personal character to your videos to connect to your audience. Make sure to use a tripod so that your videos don’t give your audience vertigo. You don’t want to turn users away before they have a chance to check out your offerings, so if you think that hiring a pro will turn people on instead of off, then spend the extra money and hire a professional. The most important benefit of hiring a professional videographer is that the final product will be consistently high-quality and web ready.

It is possible to create great results yourself. Make sure you are using a high quality camera attached to a tripod. A high quality microphone is a good choice. You will also need software to encode your video. Good lighting works best. Be sure to use backgrounds that are plain.

Video Strategy is Important: Before your video shoot, you’ll want to plan an effective strategy. First, think about your budget; The longer the video, the more your video is going to cost. Best practices for videos are debated by many. As a rule, a minute to two minutes is plenty. Viewers will click away after five or even four minutes. Make sure your video is not that long. You will also need to decide who is going to be in your video. You will want to effectively sell your CPA firm’s services. This can be accomplished without a partner in the video. As long as you feel that your employees can be a positive representation of your firm, you will likely pay them less than you’d pay professional talent.

Do it! Impress and Hold Your Audience: Most importantly, your video needs to deliver useful, relevant content that captures and maintains the interest of your viewers. There are literally hundreds of competing websites for accountants vying for your audience. To make yours stand out, make sure your video captures and holds visitors’ attention. The tone of your video is very important. It is something you should carefully consider. Do you want to use humor? Do you want your video to appear more serious? In either case, you should make your video authentic. The most successful website videos make use of the traffic that visits websites for accountants. They allow your visitors to make a personal connection with your firm. This builds trust and ultimately drives your visitors to action. No viewer will respond positively to a video that is nothing more than a veiled sales pitch.

Distribute and Market When your video is finished, make use of it with sharing sites. Market your firm with your video! Post your finished video to sharing sites such as YouTube, Metacafe, and Vimeo and be sure to embed the video on page on your website. This not simply shows your video, it provides a powerful link between your video on the sharing site and your domain. You get the benefit of the video site’s search engine popularity for your site via your video. It can significantly help you with good search engine results.

Examining IE9 with a CPA Website Designer

Well, Internet Explorer 9 has been out for long enough to check out now, and my verdict is in. Internet Explorer 9 is Microsoft’s next gen browser version, but unless you have fun with browser games it’s not much of a blessing to the accounting business. This has been the first version upgrade of Microsoft’s browser in years. It is a terribly overdue improvement, but in my opinion it just doesn’t cut the mustard. With the dawn of CSS3 and HTML5 something certainly needed to be done. In this article, we’ll take a look at IE9 and try to understand how it will change the way accounting websites are designed.

Hardware Acceleration
One of the biggest improvements that came with the latest version of Internet Explorer was hardware acceleration, but this improvement won’t really do us much good in terms of accounting website design. This feature is actually well executed… if you have a machine that will run it. If you have ever played a Facebook game like Farmville, you’ll notice that your browser will likely encounter lag or a drop in frames per second (FPS) when you were viewing an area of the game that had a lot of activity. IE9′s hardware acceleration will pretty much eliminate this nuisance.

Got Vista?
This really ticks me off. We could use IE9 to it’s full (if limited) potential and you may very well not be able to see the changes. IE9 only works on Windows 7 and Vista. This is a big deal from a web designers point of view. XP is more than 40% of the market so a LOT of users can’t benefit from the browsers new functionality. Windows Vista is almost unused with only 14% market share, and windows 7 only has about 26%. This means more of your clients and prospects use XP than Vista and Windows 7 combined, yet Microsoft still said no to having IE9 work with XP!

CSS3
My biggest disappointment is IE9′s treatment of CSS3. CSS is a “style sheet language” that allows document standards like fonts, colors etc to be defined with defaults and standards specific to that document. CSS3 offers a lot of opportunities for us as website designers in terms of the aesthetics of your site. It allows us to do more with less code, making your online documents smaller, better looking, faster loading, and easier for search engines to index. CSS3 supports a whole host of new style elements that IE9 does not. When Microsoft was boasting that IE9 works with HTML5 and CSS3, I was starting to think that Microsoft was getting with the times. Nope.

I could see some of these properties being usable in future releases. Truth is I haven’t been paying that much attention and by now I should hope some of them already have. We’re just using the new standards (which other browsers DO support) and hoping that IE catches up at some point. However, I see no excuse to why Microsoft couldn’t integrate the properties of border image, text shadow, and gradients into IE9. These three elements alone could allow us to replace a lot of images that we’re currently forced to use. This makes page files smaller, faster loading, and more readable to the search engines.

Shame on you, Microsoft!

Overview
Sheer performance makes IE9 a significant improvement from previous versions of Internet Explorer, but that doesn’t do me a lot of good as a CPA website designer. I’m furious that they chose not to support XP; and they’re not fooling anyone: this was a choice. The CSS3 support just made me wince. IE9 is only a marginal improvement, worth downloading and using if you’re currently on IE8 but certainly not worthy of the fanfare it received and certainly not on par competing browsers with Firefox and Chrome.

It would be nice if Microsoft would patch it up a little… or a lot. But Microsoft isn’t big on product support and they’re throwing out a lot of signals that they’d just as soon move on. A few weeks ago Microsoft released a preview of Internet Explorer 10. Strangely enough, Microsoft is continuing to hack away at the compatibility of their browsers with their own operating systems! At this time, IE10 will only be available for the Windows 7 operating system. My advice, don’t bother. I mean Vista seriously sucks and that is a good reason for advanced users to upgrade their OS, but the rest of us will be just fine switching browsers.

For now IE is bound to remain a “granny browser”. I am going to continue to counsel my clients to use Firefox, but keep an eye on Chrome…