Developing and managing a website is an integral part of a financial advisor’s online brand presence. As your business grows and reaches important milestones, the decision to refresh your website at regular intervals can help support that growth. The lifespan of a website’s design can depend on many factors, but a general best practice is that you should consider a website redesign every 2-3 years. Doing so allows you to keep up with industry design trends, changes in user behaviors, and search engine algorithms. If you don’t already have a website, we encourage you to prioritize designing some kind of intentional web presence for your business. Doing so can help not only establish your brand’s credibility and build trust and familiarity, but also attract prospects. A recent study by eMoney1 found that 98% of its participants say that a website is important when choosing a financial advisor.
Developing a website can sound like a daunting task, so we want to lead by setting the example and showing how doable it is. We embarked on the project of redesigning our website in 2023 and we’re proud to be releasing the website to the public today! As part of the redesign, you will see new colors, custom illustrations, animations, layout choices, interactive components, and more information on who IFG is and what we do.
To make things easy, we want to outline the approach we took during our web design and development process to give you a head start!
Define your project scope. Do this by taking into account your business goals, value proposition, target audience, and the problem you’re looking to solve for them.
Design the website architecture. This is the structure of your site, and it determines how many and which pages you will have (home page, contact page, missions & values, etc.). During this stage, you can brainstorm and decide which pages to include on the website along with sections, headings, written content, and images/illustrations to pair with text.
Gather Content. Utilizing your website architecture, start to gather all the content you will need. Write out your headings and paragraphs for your sections and gather all images or illustrations to pair with them.
Design Your Pages. During this phase you want to start sketching out rough layout ideas on paper and translating them into full design concepts. This phase is iterative and the more feedback you can get the better your results will be.
Development Phase. With a finished design you can start developing your website. Today there are platforms that provide you with personalized, easy-to-build websites, original content, and marketing automation, such as FMG & Snappy Kraken.
We hope that this gives you some insight and a spark of creativity! We believe you will love the look and feel of our public site. This project is intended to set the stage for what’s to come this year from IFG. Stay Tuned!
Sources: eMoney Consumer Marketing Survey, September 2020, n=2,000