subject: Distinctive Accounting Website Design Without the Excessive Costs [print this page] Distinctive Accounting Website Design Without the Excessive Costs
Custom CPA and Accounting website design is costly. Costs can quickly and easily spiral out of control, but there are a number of simple tricks that will meaningfully shrink, if not entirely eliminate, these setup costs.
Personally I recommend utilizing a template instead of investing in a custom designer.
Once you've considered all your options and you've decided you really want your website to be unique, there are still a couple of great tricks for avoiding the expense and hassle of a $2000 to $3000 full blown custom website design. Consider modifying an existing template, or combining the best features of two or more existing templates to create a new, completely unique one.
The cheapest and easiest way to customize a template is to change the header image. You can see a picture or image on the top of a lot of accounting website designs. That picture can easily be replaced with one of your own. Colors, fonts and menus are also easily modified on most templates. Simple changes like this rarely cost more than $300 (usually much less).
Alternately you might want to try combining two or more existing templates into a new, completely unique design. Ive done this before on a number of occasions. One client in particular, Bernstein Rosen & Company CPAs PC, stands out in my memory.
On the Bernstein job the first website design had a graphic element they really liked. It showed a stylized image people building a brightly colored puzzle-bridge to a "platform of success". The accounting firm worked with us on changing the graphic to better suit the companies existing marketing efforts. They resized it, repositioned it, and subdued the colors, changing them to better match the company's trademark blue.
They felt the overall structure of this particular style was too simplistic. Instead they chose a different template as a guide to frame the rest of the site. When it was done it had the elegance the firm had been looking for, but it also retained the "movement" of the puzzle graphic. This gave the whole design a perfect touch of fun.
The result was awesome, and the cost to the practice was a diminutive fragment of the expense of a true custom accounting website design.
For most local practices a ready to use template is good enough. As your business develops, and as your clientele becomes more sophisticated you might feel a need to build an accounting website design that more closely represents your personal brand. When this time arrives remember, you don't have to start from scratch to get a distinctive website that corresponds to the rest of your business' design strategy.
