Website builds for financial, accounting and tax firms

An SEC-registered adviser, a state-registered adviser, an enrolled agent and a bookkeeper may offer overlapping services, yet each answers to a different mix of rules about what a page may show, what must be posted, and how client documents travel.

This page covers which rule touches which part of the site, portal links and secure upload, and the pages a build carries. Writing about fees is on our financial firms content hub. Everything below is a planning map for your compliance officer or counsel, not legal advice.

Which rule touches which part of the site

The SEC's compliance guide says the first part of the Marketing Rule's advertisement definition covers communications offering "the investment adviser's investment advisory services with regard to securities to prospective clients," and "does not include one-on-one communications," with exceptions for hypothetical performance. A public services page reads a lot like that, so the chief compliance officer decides which pages count. The decision shapes design: a review widget needs room for disclosures on whether the person is a client and was compensated, and a performance display must be able to show net results beside gross and, in most cases, cover specific time periods. The rule's text reaches advisers registered or required to be registered with the SEC, so a state-registered adviser should ask its state securities regulator which rules apply.

The SEC's Form CRS guide is direct: "You must post the current version of the relationship summary prominently on your public website, if you have one." Circular 230 section 10.30 bars "a misleading or deceptive statement or claim" in public communication and says a practitioner who publishes a fee schedule may charge no more than the published rates "for at least 30 calendar days after the last date on which the schedule of fees was published." A fee page stays published for as long as it is live, so ask counsel when that clock starts after a rate changes; a visible effective date, with earlier versions kept on file, makes the answer easy to document.

Client portals and secure document upload

Clients often look to the website for a way to send documents. A contact form is not a document vault. Our builds email form submissions to the business, which works for a name and phone number and is the wrong channel for a W-2, so the form should say not to attach financial documents and should link to the firm's secure portal.

The rules behind that differ by firm. The FTC Safeguards Rule lists "tax preparation firms" and "investment advisors that aren't required to register with the SEC" among covered institutions, and the FTC's summary calls for encrypting customer information on the firm's system and in transit and for multi-factor authentication. SEC-registered advisers and broker-dealers fall under Regulation S-P instead, which requires written policies that "address administrative, technical, and physical safeguards for the protection of customer information" and an incident response program. The website's part is to send people there, never to open a weaker channel.

Pages the build carries and how it runs

Most firms need a page per service, a bio for each professional that explains every designation in plain words, a fee or engagement page, a getting-started page, portal links, and a footer holding the disclosures the compliance officer specifies, including the Form CRS link where it applies. As a launch check, ask the office manager, "If a client sent us a tax return through the website tomorrow, where would it land, and who could open it?" Authority Asset gathers registration status, approved disclosure language, dated fee schedules and portal links, because our designers should not have to guess whether a firm is SEC- or state-registered. Hudson Twenty-One records how the partners explain things, Market Intelligence researches what prospects ask, and AEO Creation turns those inputs into answer-first pages. The build adds JSON-LD, an XML sitemap, redirects, mobile and automated accessibility checks, and a quality gate on copy, and the firm's reviewer should approve each page before it goes live. WordPress fits a firm that wants to publish its own commentary, Netlify one that wants low upkeep with edits handled by us, and Squarespace one that wants a simple editor of its own.