Your website is your professional calling card. Is it still stuck in the ’90s? Or does it exist at all? If you built your website a long time ago or if you don’t have one, now might be the time to craft a modern website that presents your business in the best possible light.

As a financial advisor, you should have a website that focuses on content and effective visual design rather than on transactions and e-commerce. You can go in one of two ways to achieve this focus on content: either use your site to update and educate clients regularly with new articles (effectively making it a blog) or simply use your website to educate clients and prospects about your services, using static pages that are updated infrequently.

(Either way, you will need to operate within the communications regulations that apply to your practice. Consult your compliance department before embarking on any kind of marketing or client communications endeavour.)

There are several options available to help you build a new website, ranging from the simple to the complex.

– All-in-one website builders

If you’re planning on doing the lion’s share of the building yourself and creating a simple, brochure-style site, there are services that not only host your website for you, but enable you to build it using drag-and-drop components directly from within your browser.

These all-in-one services range from purely design-driven sites through to full-blown online content-management systems (CMSes) that offer you advanced functions for managing, changing and expanding content on your site.

At the design-focused end, you’ll find sites such as Wix (www.wix.com), Yola (www.yola.com) and Jimdo (www.jimdo.com), each of which offer a handful of templates that you can customize by adjusting fonts and colours and embedding your own media. Moonfruit (www.moonfruit.com) is another design-focused, “roll your own” website service that offers some rudimentary blogging capabilities.

Services with greater focus on frequently updated content tend to position themselves as a combined design tool and CMS in one. Weebly (https://weebly.com) contains all the drag-and-drop features of a website design system, but also lets you draft and schedule blog posts with integrated sharing on social media. Webflow (https://webflow.com) started as a design tool, but expanded last year to include its own CMS options. Squarespace (www.squarespace.com), a customizable template system, offers the capability to blog as part of a team, with real-time comments.

WordPress (https://wordpress.com), one of the most popular blogging tools on the Internet, offers its own hosted site-builder option.

If you decide to use any all-in-one, drag-and-drop website building provider, make sure that you aren’t locked into its service. The day may come when you want to take your website and use another hosting company to put your site online for you. Webflow is a service that lets you export your website as a set of files, so that you can easily take it somewhere else.

– Stand-alone content systems

Some of the more sophisticated all-in-one services are pretty flexible, and probably will meet the needs of many financial advisors. If you want still more functionality, you could download CMS software that gives you more control over your customized website. You then can put your site online using a third-party company that hosts the files for you.

Many hosting firms will install the CMS automatically.

In addition to WordPress’ all-in-one site builder, this platform offers a downloadable blogging framework that can be customized with countless themes, templates and customizable plug-ins. The same applies to two other popular CMSes: Joomla (www.joomla.ca) and Drupal (www.drupal.org). These platforms often are more complex to install and manage, and offer functionality that the average advisor simply won’t need.

– Pre-baked templates

You’ll want to start with a template for your website. Some site-building platforms will offer templates designed for specific industries. Wix, for example, features templates specifically for financial services firms and advisory practices.

WordPress has, by far, the largest array of templates. There are hundreds, if not thousands of them, designed for a variety of pursuits and industries, and available from a variety of online marketplaces. Many themes offer limited customization, such as the ability to move sidebars around and add slots for images. Themify (https://themify.me/), offers its own software plug-in for WordPress, which adds more drag-and-drop functionality to any WordPress theme, bringing that platform closer to the design-driven, do-it-yourself websites.

One of the advantages of using a downloadable CMS is that you can work with coders, if necessary, to tinker with the underlying computer code that makes up your WordPress theme. In most cases, though, this under-the-hood customization won’t be necessary.

– Finishing touches

When designing your website, ensure that it is “responsive.” In web-design parlance, that means your site will adjust itself to display properly on smaller screens, such as on tablets and smartphones. According to SimilarWeb Ltd.’s State of Mobile Web, U.S. 2015 report, roughly 56% of all consumer traffic to the leading U.S. websites come from mobile devices. Chances are that your traffic will be similar.

Also, ensure that you are tracking what visitors are doing on your site and where they are coming from by using a suitable analytics system. The more sophisticated all-in-one site design services typically include this feature, but you may have to add it to WordPress manually.

Finally, look into search engine optimization to ensure that your site is easy to find.

The barriers to building an effective website for your advisory business have been falling for years, and the level of technical expertise needed is at an all-time low. Creating a site without calling in a consultant and spending thousands of dollars is entirely possible now.

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