Drake Tax Services engaged Creative Repute to support a wide range of website and marketing needs, including the following: a full front-end and backend website audit, ongoing technical fixes to the site’s forms and accessibility, business hours and footer cleanup, a bio and About page project for founder Tony Drake, a newsletter strategy, and groundwork for a new social media presence. Creative Repute moved across all of it, from Gravity Forms repairs to search engine optimization to About page content, while keeping the client team updated with a clear list of completed work and next steps at every stage.
Tax practices live and die by appointment scheduling during a narrow window each year, so a website that makes booking harder than it needs to be costs more than it would for most small businesses. That pressure shaped how the team prioritized the work from the first week.
What Did the Drake Tax Services Website Audit Cover?
The engagement opened with a website audit to understand the site as it existed and confirm the access needed to support it going forward. The team requested hosting access through GoDaddy to review the backend directly, while testing everything else through its own accounts first, so the client’s personal email never had to be shared. Backend access to a website is a practical necessity; a client’s personal inbox is a different kind of trust, and the team kept that line clear from the start.
The initial priorities were laid out plainly: a website audit and recommendations, a review of the Gravity Forms setup, restoring and testing form notification emails, extending how long form entries stayed accessible, and setting up Google Analytics and Search Console. A second list followed close behind, framed as opportunities to explore once the foundational work was done: expanding the online biography, building a strategy for more Google reviews, additional lead-generation and marketing ideas including an email newsletter, and signage or promotional materials down the line. Splitting the work this way, must-do items against later opportunities, gave the client a clear sense of sequence from day one.
The front-end audit came first, since it could move forward without waiting on hosting access, and it gave the team a working map of what needed attention before the backend review even began. Real progress started within the first week, instead of everyone waiting on a single access request to clear.
Why Weren’t Drake Tax Services’ Contact Form Notifications Working?
The site’s contact form had two real problems once the team looked closely. Notification emails weren’t reliably reaching the client, and form entries were being cleared from the dashboard after only two or three days, sometimes before anyone had a chance to review them. A potential client fills out a form, assumes someone will follow up, and nothing happens on the other end.
The team restored and tested the notification emails, confirmed they were working, and extended entry retention from a few days to indefinite storage in the dashboard, with the option to shorten that window later if security concerns called for it. Indefinite retention is the more convenient default, but it carries security implications, so the client was given the choice instead of having it made silently on their behalf.
Later in the engagement, the team updated the notification emails to include full form information directly in the email itself, so submissions could be reviewed without logging into the backend at all. For any professional managing client work on top of website administration, that’s the difference between checking an inbox and remembering a separate login just to see what someone wrote in a contact form.
How Should a Small Business Display Its Hours Online?
Getting business hours right took attention to detail that’s easy to overlook, and it’s a good example of how closely the team reads a site before making live updates. Saturday and Sunday were running together with the weekday hours in the header, so they were split onto their own lines, a quick, precise fix that made the hours easier to read at a glance.
The site’s hours were also listed as a static “Open” line, a format that described the practice at a single moment without accounting for how much its availability shifts across the year.
The team talked with the client about how availability changes across tax season: which hours hold steady, which loosen up once the season winds down, and what the practice wanted a visitor to do once they saw the hours at all. That conversation surfaced a gap in the old copy. “Open” told a visitor when the office happened to be staffed; it did nothing to move them toward booking. The team recommended replacing it with language built around the action itself: “Book an Appointment: Mon – Fri 9:00 am – 5:00 pm | Sat 9:00 am – 3:00 pm | Sunday CLOSED.” The new phrasing reads as evergreen, so it doesn’t need updating every season, and it turns a passive status line into another touchpoint nudging a visitor toward booking instead of just informing them the office is open. It also left room for flexibility: clients could still book outside the posted hours if the calendar allowed it and the client wanted to stay available after hours.
Once that was settled, the team standardized the format across the entire site, so no page carried a slightly different version of the hours that a client comparing two pages might catch and question. Hours sound like a minor detail until you consider how often it’s the first piece of information a potential client needs.
What Small Website Fixes Make the Biggest Difference?
A handful of smaller fixes ran alongside the bigger pieces, the kind of work that rarely gets noticed individually but adds up to a site that feels considerably more finished. The header phone number was made tap-to-call, useful for anyone browsing on a phone who wants to reach the office without copying a number into their dialer manually. A zoom restriction that had been blocking mobile accessibility was removed, since forcing a fixed zoom level on mobile makes a site harder to read for anyone who needs to adjust text size. A skip-to-content link was added and made visibly functional for keyboard navigation, an accessibility requirement that matters for screen reader users and is easy to overlook without a dedicated accessibility review.
The footer was rebuilt entirely, with line breaks separating the office number, cell number, and booking hours so the block of text didn’t run together into a wall of digits and words. Phone numbers across the site were standardized to a single consistent format, down to where the parentheses and spaces landed around the area code.
A site with tap-to-call, working accessibility features, and consistent formatting reads as considerably more polished than one without, even when a visitor couldn’t say exactly why. The individual fixes are small; the cumulative effect is a site that behaves the way a visitor expects, without friction they’d notice only by its absence. Easy to read, easy to call, and consistent from page to page, creating a comfortable experience for a first-time visitor.
How Was Tony Drake’s Bio and About Page Redesigned?
Alongside the technical work, the team began developing an extended biography for founder Tony Drake, led by Creative Repute’s marketing specialist who had already built the client’s newsletter strategy. Instead of working from assumptions about what should go into a professional bio, the process started with a discovery call built around specific prompts: professional milestones and turning points worth including, stories that show how Tony’s work has shaped a client’s career, community connections, and local relationships along with supporting materials like photos, licenses, or documents that could add texture to the final piece.
The team treated those prompts as a starting point rather than a script, since a client reciting answers to a checklist rarely produces writing that sounds like them, while a real conversation gives a writer enough material to truly capture someone’s voice. That first conversation, and a second round of discussion that followed to add more context and depth, produced a working draft covering Tony’s career: decades in corporate finance, the founding of Drake Mortgage Solutions, a real estate development venture built and later sold, and his current work combining real estate and tax preparation under one roof.
Creative Repute built the foundation for that bio, then took the work further by designing and coding a new About page to house it. The team restructured the page around a career timeline and a dedicated education, community, and personal section, complete with custom icons to help the content read cleanly, moving the page’s structure and content closer to Tony’s actual story, journey, and legacy.
How Did the Ad Design Extend the Drake Tax Services Brand?
The team designed a full-page 8.5×11 ad for Drake Tax Services, built digital-first with print use in mind, both for a community fundraising event the practice sponsored and for future use beyond it. The client’s About page content, built around Tony’s story, was the natural starting point for reference copy, but the ad itself called for a different angle. A single ad works best leading with the practice’s credibility rather than a personal narrative, so the team shifted the focus from Tony individually to Drake Tax Services as a business.
Two directions went out for review. One led with a set of stats, years in business, client count, returns filed, as proof points up front. The client chose the other: “Tax Services You Can Trust,” a headline paired with a short description of the practice’s focus on accurate, reliable service, followed by a clear list of what Drake Tax Services actually covers: individual tax returns, small business tax returns, small business bookkeeping, and personal financial statements. Anthony F. Drake’s title and headshot anchored the ad in a real person, with full contact information, phone, email, address, and website, placed prominently enough that a reader wouldn’t have to hunt for a way to reach the practice.
The design added the Drake Tax Services logo and matched the ad’s colors and typography to the client’s existing branding, keeping the piece visually consistent with everything else built for the brand rather than reading as a one-off. Built to work in both digital and print formats, the finished ad gave Drake Tax Services a piece of collateral it could reuse well beyond the original event, extending the same brand consistency the website refresh had already established into a new format entirely. The client approved the design as delivered, with no revisions needed.
How Does Creative Repute Keep Clients Updated During a Project?
Work was tracked and shared in clear, itemized updates. Each update named specifically what had moved forward and what needed a decision or piece of information from the client before the next step could begin, whether that was confirming preferred business hours, weighing in on a bio question, or granting a specific type of access. Here’s an example of one of those updates, covering work completed to date alongside recommended next steps:
Work completed:
- Updated business hours so Saturday and Sunday display on separate lines in the homepage header
- Updated footer formatting with line breaks separating office number, cell number, and booking hours
- Reviewed and optimized Gravity Forms, with attachments now sent through notification emails
- Implemented tap-to-call on phone number
- Removed a mobile zoom restriction for accessibility
- Added a skip-to-content accessibility link
- Installed and configured Yoast SEO
- Rebuilt the footer with full navigation and contact information
- Standardized business hours across the entire site
Recommended next steps:
- Set up an email newsletter platform and import the client’s existing contact list
- Configure appointment booking to require minimum advance notice, so last-minute bookings don’t catch the practice off guard
- Fix a layout issue in the About Us section of the homepage
- Replace placeholder icons on the Services page with real photos
- Add alt text to all images sitewide for accessibility and SEO
- Install analytics tools to track user behavior on the site
- Connect Google Search Console and submit the sitemap
- Add a Google reviews prompt and widget to the site
- Add schema markup to improve local search visibility
- Clean up page titles and fix duplicate headings for SEO
- Create a TikTok account with a bio, profile photo, and website link
- Write a blog post to help clients prepare for tax season
Laying out that list clearly meant the client could weigh in on priorities, reorder what mattered most, or add any new areas to focus on. That visibility kept momentum going since every update named exactly what was needed to move forward.
Ready to Give Your Website the Same Attention?
A website audit rarely stays theoretical for long. Once the real issues are on the table, from broken forms to inconsistent business hours to an About page that doesn’t yet say enough about the person behind the business, the work becomes concrete fast. Small businesses often carry these inconsistencies for years simply because no one has had the time to sit down and catalog them, let alone fix them one by one. An audit turns that backlog into a clear and organized list, identifying not only what improvements could be made, but also explaining the level of impact each item carries.
If your organization needs that same kind of close, itemized attention, whether that’s a website audit, search engine optimization, copywriting, or social media management, request a quote and let’s look at what your site actually needs.
