Unique Accounting Website Design Without Crushing Custom Design Expenses
Custom accounting website design is expensive. Your costs can quickly and easily spiral out of control, but there are some straight forward trade secrets that can seriously trim, if not entirely eliminate, these setup expenses.
Personally I recommend utilizing a template rather than investing in a custom designer.
A custom website design usually costs upwards of $2000, and this is beyond the resources of most small accounting firms. Fortunately there are some trade secrets that can significantly cut your costs. Consider modifying an existing template, or combining the best features of two or more existing templates to create a new, completely unique one.
It's really easy to make an existing template look like a completely unique website design. More often all you need to do is change the header graphic to completely transform the entire look and feel of the site. A header image is the picture you see along the top of most websites. That picture can easily be replaced with one of your own. Other elements of the website are usually pretty easy to change also. Most websites use a technique called CSS, or cascading style sheets, that make it easy to change fonts and colors, and most content managers can even make changes to their navigation menus. Simple changes like this rarely cost more than $300 (usually substantially less).
Another dirty trick that works really well is combining elements of different sites and cobbling them together into a whole new website design. That is exactly what Bernstein Rosen & Company CPAs PC requested with their firm's website.
When we were working on the Bernstein account this really proved itself. They started with a graphic element off one site that they really liked. It's very stylized and brightly colored. It shows four people working together building a puzzle bridge to 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.
A totally different website provided the overall structure of the customization. The final website design incorporates some movement that provides an element of fun.
The result was impressive, and the price to the practice was a small fragment of the expense of a true custom accounting website design.
It's that simple. If prefer not to use a standard template, but you don't want to to spring for a full blown custom accounting website design, there's a comfortable compromise available.