Set up your own professional looking Financial Services Website, complete with dynamic content and valuable tools in under a week (for under $300)

Thinking about creating your own financial services website? Have you thought about doing it yourself? Maybe you’ve requested quotes from a web designers who are trying to charge you through the nose for a basic site. Maybe you’re that designer and you’re trying to make a quick buck out of Finance Company… whatever the circumstance is, you’ve obviously found this article because you’re looking to make a Financial Services website. If this is the case, the information below is going to be useful, if not, you should leave, click on my ads, or simply stand back in awe.

Step 1 - Getting Started

Decide what you want your website to do? Is it just a brochure site with information about your company or does it actually have to do something fancy? (If it’s the later, read on, otherwise jump to step 2).

Step 2 - Adding ‘Fancy Stuff’ to your website

I’m obviously not in finance, but for the sake of the argument, lets pretend that I want to have stock market ticker on my website to give it a little extra authority. The stock market looks fancy, and people will trust you if they can see your provide up to date information on your website. I did a quick search and found this excellent ‘Market Movers’ Stock Ticker on Quote Media.

For a small fee (and a few minutes of your time adding a bit of Javascript to your page) you can seamlessly integrate dynamic information like this with your existing content. There are a number companies like Quote Media, it pays to shop around. There are plenty of free scripts around, but finding a reliable data feed is sometimes a problem.

Right now you’re probably thinking, “hang on, but I don’t have a website yet”. Sometimes it’s easiest to do things the wrong way round, I’ll explain more as we go along…

To give another example, I have also decided that I want to add a mortgage calculator to my website. You could pay a few thousand dollars to get someone to build one of these for you, or you could just Google ‘free mortgage calculator scripts‘ - in under 5 minutes, I found this one.

You can download it, and run it on just about any Apache Server (if you don’t know what that is don’t worry). You can find just about any you might need for your new finance website by searching on Google. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel (or in this case the humble mortgage calculator) - work with existing resources, you’ll save time and bucket loads of cash.

Back to Step 1 - decide what you want your website to do, and then do a Google Search. Need a Crude Oil Invoicing Estimator, search for it. Chances are someone has built one before. Once you’ve found all the resources you want to include on your website, make a list of them in a notepad file or spreadsheet. Include the website address and any notes about how you might need the components modified.

Step 3 - Organise the content for your site

Actually, you don’t want to do that - you’re a big finance guy and organizing information about your company is grunt work? Get your assistant to do it. Actually, you may as well just stop now and get your assistant to manage building your entire website. If they stuff it up you can easily fire them and hire someone who can read instructions.

In one word document gather all the information about your company, you services, contact info, etc. Create one page for each page of your website. Also include notes about functionality. For example, “on this page, a visitor should be able to request a quote for a home loan. The following information is required, bla bla bla and the quote request should go through to our sales department”, etc.

Step 4 - Choose a look and feel for your website

Again, you don’t need to hire a fancy designer, just find a template that’s a good fit for your company and then get Template Tuners to modify it. They can add your business logo and make changes to images or layout on most Template Monster Templates - pump your order through and you should have your template (complete with changes) in under a few days.

There’s over 200 Business website Templates on the Monster, here’s a few we thought would suit a Financial Services Website:

News Portal my arse. This has Finance written all over it (HTML). PRICE: $55
DEMO / DOWNLOAD | CUSTOMIZE

Orange is good. It’s bold and people trust Orange. I think, I can’t remember if that’s true or not. This template looks nice though. It’s the full package with a few bells and whistles, which makes it excellent value (HTML and Flash 8.) PRICE: $67
DEMO / DOWNLOAD | CUSTOMIZE

Do the people at your company look like this? If so, this template is probably the right one for you. Full Site (HTML and SWISH). PRICE: $50
DEMO / DOWNLOAD | CUSTOMIZE

If you don’t like any of these, have a look around on Template Monster.

STEP 5 - Bring it all together

(In as few words as possible) - If you have a domain and hosting already skip the next sentence. If you don’t have a domain find one using Picky Domains and then register it at Moniker - if you have an existing host, dump them and get an account with Pair (simply set your nameservers at Moniker to use the Pair nameservers and then add your domain there in the control panel). Once you’ve got your domain and hosting set up, post a job on Rentacoder - click on Request Bids - set the budget for about $200 - zip your files up (word document, template, and features list - Steps 2,3,4) - In bid request description box write something like “I want someone to build my website. Each page in my word document is a page of my site, I’ve got a template and need the features listed in the notepad (or spreadsheet) implemented on the indicated pages. The website must be fully functional, and all the scripts tested and you’ll have to set up our email, and upload the site to our server”.

Select a Coder who has completed more than 5 jobs and has a rating of 9.5 of above (have a look at their profile to see feedback from previous buyers). Escrow the money (you don’t have to pay them until the work is complete and you are 100% satisfied), and then sit back and watch your website come together.

Pretty easy huh? Now you know why everyone wants to be a web designer.