Personalizing Your Free Website
When you activate your free site, one of the first things you’ll notice is that it is created with the “Free Accounting Practitioner Sites” text and logo.
Not to worry. This is a simple change, but you will need to have yourself a suitable logo or graphic ready for upload. If you don’t have one, and want to create something to use, just to get rid of the branding that shows it’s a free site, then download Irfanview Graphics Editing software (http://www.irfanview.com/) , and create your own.
Irfanview is not something you want to use if you’re planning on doing anything really sophisticated, but it is a great little image manipulation software that will convert images from one type to almost any other known type, and, it has the ability to add text. Adding some text to an image will get you started, until you get what you want. That’s what I did when I got started in this stuff, and you didn’t notice the difference, did you?
So, find an image you want, resize it and crop it until you get the size that matches the theme you’ve selected, the add your text (your practice name, for example) and upload through the “Custom Header” link in the admin panel sidebar. It’s as easy as that.
First you learned to do taxes and keep books, now you can do graphics editing! Will wonders never cease?
If you’re not interested in editing graphics, and have between $25 and $50 you’re willing to invest in a professionally designed logo or graphic. Then I recommend LogoNerds. I got the logo you see used on this site done for only $27. I think that’s their going price still, but they do have a $47 package that includes a lot more than one logo.
Another thing you’re going to want to do is make sure you have the name of your site showing the way you want. Take a look at that blue bar at the top of your browser window. What does it say?
I’m looking at my test site (a href=”http://kirkward.accountingpractitioner.com” target=”blank”>http://kirkward.accountingpractitioner.com and it says “My Accounting Site – Mozilla Firefox.”
Of course you can tell from that, that I am using the Firefox browser (which I highly recommend). If I was using IE, then it would have said “My Accounting Site – Internet Explorer.”
If you haven’t changed it yet, yours will probably say “My Accounting Site” also. If that’s what you want, that’s fine. But, if I were you, I’d probably want it to reflect my practice name. You know why? Well, that’s the page title, and it’s one of the first things that the search engines look for.
To change your page title, look in the menu sidebar and click on the “Settings” link, then the “General” submenu, and then change the “Site Title” (Settings -> General -> Site Title) to what you want the search engines to see when they are looking at your site. Don’t be afraid to put some keywords in there … things like Expert, Accountant, Specialist, or some such foo fraw. It’ll help in your rankings.
Save that, and you’re done for this lesson. Take a look and see what you think. If you have any questions, of course, visit the support forum at http://support.accountingpractitioner.com and check out our tutorials there. Or, log in to your site and submit a help ticket request to take advantage of our exclusive “Rainmaker” level of personal email service.
Availability Calendar.
Leave a Comment