If visitors get confused when they look at your financial website, then the web design for the financial planner website has failed to achieve what it was intended for. The bottom line is that you have to drive traffic to the financial advisor website and convert them into clients. If you provide too many choices, the financial webpage designer, might not be able to project your vision and goals onto the webpage.
5 points to keep in mind while structuring a web design for the financial professional website:
- Marketing Focus & Purpose
- Design & Layout: Keep It Simple
- Do Not Make Your Financial Webpage Visitors Work (too hard)
- SEO: If You Build It (properly), They Will Come
- Build Your Financial Website for the Long Term
Marketing Focus & Purpose
Your financial professional website shouldn’t look like an online brochure as it doesn’t serve any marketing purposes if designed that away. However, if you intend for the financial website to look like an online company magazine highlighting your work, then focus on graphic design. Do you want a financial planner website to carry your ideas to a larger audience? In that case, you need to consider pay-per-click and other online advertising media. Attracting customers for the financial professional website isn’t an easy job. The content and web design for the financial planner website should allow the visitor to comprehend the marketing message you want to get across.
Your financial website can be a “virtual salesperson” if you include these elements:
- White background with a simple design and no flash animation.
- Easy navigation of the financial advisor website.
- Precise and well-presented content that talks about exactly what you offer.
- Simple code with minimal graphics on each page of the financial website.
- Pages that load fast.
- Properly optimizing the financial planner website for search engines.
Design & Layout: Keep It Simple
Using fancy graphics might make the financial webpage look amazing, but your objective is to sell your product or service. A financial web designer will not know about marketing or the type of audience you are targeting. It is up to you to communicate to him what you want to incorporate in the financial website design. Visitors to your financial planner website should know immediately the products and services you offer.
- Does your HOME page have a marketing focus?
- Does your copy talk about the benefits your products and services offer?
- Does your content encourage and make it easy for the visitor to contact you?
- Do your page headlines create reader interest?
The content you use for the financial professional website should list the benefits of whatever you are offering. Don’t include too many links and choices in the financial advisor webpage. Come up with a creative headline as that will catch the audience’s attention right off the bat. They will make the effort to go through the entire content if the headline is interesting and catchy. Provide your number on every page of the financial webpage so that visitors don’t hesitate to get in touch.
Do Not Make Your Visitors Work (too hard)
Information and data should be easy to find on the financial website or else the visitors will move on to a website that doesn’t require multiple searches to access particular information. Your financial planner website content must be well-organized and concise, using one or two sentence paragraphs, headings, subheadings and bulleted lists whenever possible. Make the navigation of the financial website as simply as you can without complicated drop down menus or links. You are subtly directing visitors towards the desired action you want them to take.
SEO: If You Build it (properly) They Will Come
SEO or Search Engine Optimization is necessary to ensure that people from your target market visit the financial advisor website. Search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN are the main sources of traffic for almost every financial website. The financial planner website needs to optimized with appropriate keywords (terms that people use while searching for precuts or services online) in the content and financial webpage coding. This is to ensure peak performance across the complete spectrum of search engines. Traffic from SEO will not happen overnight – be patient and you will get a good rank after a few weeks of implementing SEO strategies.
Build Your Financial Advisor Website for the Long Term
The financial website should be built on a CMS (Content Management System). Technology changes with time, so be careful that you don’t use something that is outdated in a year or two. The financial planner website should last for some years at least.
