Here Is An Unboring Site In A Boring Industry

Posted on November 3, 2012 by David Cohen

I think whenever you write anything positive about how much you like a business site, and you don’t have data to prove if the site “works”, you’ll probably get called out by some marketer for being too subjective.

Sorry. There’s no data or Google Analytics screenshots about how the site performs. The story is, I clicked a link somebody I follow on Twitter shared and I landed on this accounting site:

accountaning-balance-virtual-home-davidmcohen

I like this site a lot. I don’t get the color scheme. But the site has a good vibe. And for accountants the copywriting is amusing, with subtle intelligence running through it.

They seem like accountants you’d like to get a beer with and not accounts you’d like to squirt sriracha in their eyes.

Balance Virtual deserves a link. Not that my crappy blog will do much to help their site get more visibility in search, but why not.

3 out of 3 accounts agree: this site sucks

Before I wrote this post, I sent a link to Balance Virtual’s site to three accounts and asked, “What do you think about this site?”

All three responses were about the same. To paraphrase:

“The website sucks and doesn’t look like what an accounting website should look like.”

Great. Now I like the site even better.

If I had to make some SEO critiques, they might want to put a keyword like Accounting or Small Business Accounting in their title tags, and they should put their physical mailing address with their phone number somewhere logical on the site (hint: footer). Maybe even set up Authorship and become mobile-friendly.

As a marketer, what I like most about the site is that it’s supposed to be boring, because accounting is supposed to be boring, but it’s not boring at all.

Check out their pricing page:

balance-virtual-price-page-davidmcohen

To me, this is done well. Whether or not you agree with their revenue model, you can probably agree it’s a creative way to sell stuff.

If there’s a point to writing a post about Balance Virtual’s site, it’s that if your client thinks they’re in a boring industry, so it's OK to have a boring site with terrible writing and stock photos, think about making a business case for why they should do the opposite.

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  • http://level343.com/article_archive/ SEOcopy

    Having fun with a topic like Accounting isnot easy, but it’s apparent after perusing this site it’s the way to go… I really enjoyed “We don’t charge for the puns, and will substitute with really great knock-knock jokes if you prefer.”

    As a marketer I’m sure you can appreciate that at the end of the day, we all have a story to tell. We’re given a blank canvas (in this case a web page) and we have to grab our readers attention. With social playing such an integral part of ones’ site that story has to come through. The balance of writing for your readers and search engines is not an easy task. We (Level343) rarely focus on search engines…that’s not to say we don’t, but we find that balance once we understand the story.

    One of my favorite slogans “You don’t run a piece of a company; we don’t provide half of a campaign” With Balance Virtual you can see they’re aiming for that personal touch…

    • http://www.davidmcohen.com/ David Cohen

      Excellent thoughts – I never thought about writing on the web as having a blank canvas. I like this idea. It’s a transformative way to think about communicating online when you need to get people’s attention.

      Great works of art, that originally started on a blank canvas, draw untold millions of people to admire them. What if our copy had the same power? To pull people instead of pushing people.