So You Want to be a Forensic Accountant?

By Dennis D. McDonald

Tracy Coenen’s FRAUDFILES blog is this week’s Linkedin Bloggers Blog Boost target. I’ve read a number of the postings on her blog and have learned a lot in the process about “forensic accounting” that I did not know before.

What, you don’t know what “forensic accounting” is? Well, check out this category of posts on Tracy’s blog (this blog is well indexed) and you’ll find out.

I do have some questions and comments about the blog which I’ll summarize here.

1. This is an example of a combined company web site (Coenen’s forensic accounting firm) and her blog (which combines news with Tracy’s interesting comments on corporate affairs related to fraud, theft, and general financial wrongdoing). It’s not always clear when you’re on the blog and when you’re on the web site, and it’s easy to confuse the “home” link at the top with a blog’s “home” page. Perhaps color wise or typographically the two sections could be made to be more obviously different? 
2. Tracy’s blog does not allow comments. I’m wondering if this is a trend caused by the increasingly onerous nature of comment spam. I’m lucky to have a vendor (Squarespace) that does an excellent job of preventing most comments spam, but I know other bloggers who, literally, have turned off their commenting feature since they get so much comment spam. Since I’m one of those who believes in leaving comments as a way to get a dialog going (as well as link backs to my blog) I find the lack of a comment feature to be a major annoyance when visiting a blog that has interesting information, like Tracy’s. In fact, the lack of a comment feature on a blog makes the blog look and feel like, well, like a common web site, which I know is not the intention. Perhaps Tracy could add more features to enable feedback, such as more prominent email or contact information, to soften the blow of accepting no comments?
3. One of the things I like about Tracy’s blog is that she has pages with multiple article summaries. You click on a link to get the whole article. I do the same thing on my own front page and index pages. I think it’s a useful feature that removes the need for visitors to scroll down through long postings to get down to the next one — and I write long postings! The only caveat I give to Tracy’s approach is that the links to the full articles aren’t always that explicit. A couple of periods at the bottom of the posting […] indicates that there’s more. You must then click on the title, not the periods, to go to the full article; this could be more explicit.
4. Color-wise, I find the blog a bit monotonous. Maybe another color (e.g., for the text of headings) might spice things up a bit. (Mind you, that suggestion comes from someone whose blog’s primary color scheme consists of the exotic combination of red, white, blue, and gray!)

That said, I enjoy Tracy’s blog. It’s not the same old Web 2.0, collaboration, project management, and technology stuff I write about all the time! Vive la difference!

Copyright (c) 2006 by Dennis D. McDonald

Comments

[Tracy Coenen]

Thanks for the comments, Dennis. I'm not sure if you're looking for answers or if your questions are rhetorical, but here I go.

My plan was to have the blog blend seemlessly with the rest of the site. Seems I've met that goal, since you were a little confused as to when you were on the blog and when you were on the site. I had a problem, however, integrating my dropdown boxes on my main site into the Wordpress blog. So the blog page looks a *tiny* bit different.

The whole comment thing... I haven't yet bought into the idea of allowing comments on my posts. I might reconsider that in the future. At this point, the purpose of the blog is to drive traffic to the site. I get more traffic than I used to, so it has worked. Although if comments were allowed, I suppose I might get more repeat visitors. I am going to take your comments under advisement!

Article summaries....Good point. Thanks!

On the boring colors.... Come now, Dennis. There's purple, orange (visited links), black, and charcoal. What more could you want? *grin*

Overall I went for a very clean look. I've experimented with a few templates in the past, and found that this one has gotten the most compliments.

Thanks again for your constructive feedback!