Some advisory firms feel they must work face-to-face with a local designer to build their website instead of working over the phone with an Advisor Products project manager. They feel that their branding is too important to be managed by Advisor Products.



I don't agree. Our designers do a great job. But who am I to argue?



So we price our services so you can use a local graphic designer and still use Advisor Products for hosting. Hosting is where we add the most value.



When we host your site, you get our content management system, BackOffice. That’s built specifically for advisory firms and has oodles of features just for advisors. Compliance review workflow, website archiving, pre-formatted pages created specifically for advisors that you can easily add to your site, a secure client vault system, and integration with 16 apps used in advisor practices that convert data in your internal systems into client communications. Plus, we provide 10 or 15 wealth management articles monthly to aupdate your site and now we’ve started offering videos on personal finance topics.



Candidly, many advisors don’t value publishing wealth management content on their website. But your clients are getting bombarded with financial information from so many sources. Why forfeit the opportunity to be their trusted source of financial ideas?



Providing clients with authoritative educational information on a broad range of personal finance topics—even if you don’t agree with every word in every article we write—promotes meaningful conversation with clients. Moreover, with technology enabling you to select every article and video that appears on your website or e-newsletter, you control the content that your firm distributes. You can even customize the content for each individual cleint's personal interests!



Because we host sites for 1,300 advisory firms, Advisor Products can offer all these features at an afforable price. Local designers just cannot compete with us in providing these specialized services and we now get a lot of referrals from designers and agencies hired by advisory firms.



This is why Advisor Products doesn’t force you to work with our graphic designers. We’re happy to work with your design firm if you believe that will get you the best website.



You get a huge discount on a custom website by having your own artist design the graphical interface of your website.



We send your graphic designer everything needed to work with us—specifications of the size of graphics, what types of files to send and all other details they need to understand how to work with us. A project manager from Advisor Products coordinates deadlines for your team, the artist, and our technicians to construct your site on budget and on time.



Please don’t take any of this to mean that the design services offered by Advisor Products are anything less than great. The value we provide in design is fantastic. In fact, your local designer will probably charge you a lot more than what we charge for graphic design.



However, giving advisors the freedom to hire their own artist demonstrates Advisor Products’ commitment to serve your best interest and help you succeed.