It’s that time of year again: new payroll tax tables for the US and Canada. They’ll be available for download next week.
This is turning out to be a tough year for US state payrolls. Several states did complete overhauls, which need extra time to figure out. Arkansas added a withholding table with 52 steps! Maryland redid things so much that we still can’t figure it out. They combine state and county taxes, but we need to separate them for W-2 forms. It makes the process extra difficult.
Part of the annual payroll process is to update web pages for every state. We already modernized the payroll pages a month ago for the new website. There’s no sense in entering text twice, so the new version will swap into the existing site. It’ll be a sneak peek at the new look.
Meanwhile, the new online Reference Manual is shaping up nicely. Many of the existing pages were too big, but now they are split into bite-sized morsels.
The Reference section is so good that it makes sense to merge all the other support pages into it. Having everything in the same folder will make linking much easier. The triage will start soon: delete some, move some, merge some.
During the Aughties, our marketing was almost entirely SEO- Search Engine Optimizing. It mostly was guessing how Google would rate each page and each keyword.
The rules kept changing. Eventually we gave up. A decade of SEO left behind a lot of clutter on the site: long file and folder names with keywords in them, too many mentions of accounting software. Part of the update process is clearing out all that cruft.
The goal of this website update is to make a useful reference for users, that also is easy for our staff to maintain. Whether Google likes it or not is pretty much like trying to please the weather gods.
Dennis Kolva
Programming Director
TurtleSoft.com
