Think for a minute about your favourite website?

What do you like about it? How often do you visit it?

Usually when I ask financial advisers this question, their favourite site is one that is updated regularly, so they visit it regularly. It could be a site about news, sport, financial things or it could even be a community site like an online forum or social media like Facebook. The common thread is fresh content – a reason to keep coming back.

So how does your financial planning website compare?

The sad reality is that very few financial planning websites are updated regularly. I’ve seen some where the most recent client newsletter on their site is at least a year old. What message does this send to your clients?

A financial planning website that is updated regularly provides the visitor with the impression that your firm is up to date.

And that’s probably (hopefully) something that is important to you.

So, how often do you update your website?

And the second question is – How easy is it to update your website yourself?

A lot of advisers have websites built using tools like Front Page or Dreamweaver. They have great looking websites, but if they want to make any changes, they need to get their designers involved and get them to do it.  This can take time, and costs money.

Another option is to use a program like Adobe Contribute where you can access your website and make changes to the text in pages and even add new pages. Contribute allows you to access your website templates so you create new pages based on the templates of pages that are already there.

So Contribute could be a good option, as it allows you to make changes as often as you need to.

Introducing WordPress

The option I prefer is using an open source platform called WordPress.  WordPress enables you to quickly create a good looking website using a range of pre-built templates. You can easily add new pages and change the look of the site.

In addition (and importantly) WordPress has a community of developers who provide a range of plugins to enhance the program. Some of these plugins give you more control over the Search Engine Optimization of your site (so you can rank better in Google), others make it easier to incorporate email sign up boxes (like the one I use here).

WordPress is primarily a blogging platform, so if you’re looking to start a blog as part of your site, this program makes it easy.

This site runs on WordPress. WordPress itself is free. I use a theme called Headway which does cost money (under $100). Headway allows me to customise the look of my site easily.

The best thing about WordPress is that it’s so easy to use. There’s no special program to load onto your computer. You just login to your site over the web, and make changes, add pages and content using your web browser.

So you could be away from your office but still be able to update content – I’ve done this before when I’ve been interstate on business trips.

And did I mention that WordPress is free.

In my opinion, WordPress provides a simple solution for a lot of websites where the business wants to add content regularly.

Contact us today to learn more about how you may be able to use WordPress in your financial planning website.