A financial services website fails at the approval step, not the design step.
The expensive version is finding that out a week before launch, when balance and prominence are layout problems rather than sentences. Glide builds regulated firms a site with the rules written in from the first draft, and a structure you can still change afterwards. One monthly retainer from £1,000 plus VAT.
The week-before-launch rewrite
A design agency wins the project on the visual. Wireframes are signed off, the build starts, and copy is treated as the thing that gets poured in at the end. Two weeks before go-live it reaches compliance for the first time.
What comes back is not a list of word changes. The hero promises an outcome without the qualification next to it. A benefit sits above the fold and its risk sits three screens below. A comparison table implies a superiority claim nobody can evidence. Each of those is a layout decision, so the fix is a partial rebuild by a team that has already moved on to another project.
Write the constrained pages first and let the design serve them. It is a less impressive first meeting and a far cheaper project.
What gets built in
Build for the second year, not the launch
Regulated firms change their websites rarely, and the reason is almost never budget. It is that changing anything requires an approval cycle and a developer, so the site quietly becomes a brochure nobody touches. Three architecture decisions prevent that:
Disclosures in one place
Regulatory status, permissions wording and complaints routes belong in a single source that every page renders from. Copy-pasted across fourteen pages, they drift, and the day one changes you have fourteen problems and no list of them.
Pages that can be added without a developer
A new service page should cost an approval cycle, not an approval cycle plus a sprint. If publishing is expensive, the firm stops publishing, and the search work that depends on it dies quietly.
A layout where risk can sit beside benefit
Prominence is proportion. If the design has nowhere to put a qualification except a footnote, the design will lose every argument with your approver, and it should.
The Glide Retainer, from £1,000/mo
The website, hosting, maintenance, the search foundations and the compliance-aware marketing in one monthly fee, with no five-figure upfront build.
See pricingFinancial services websites, answered
We draft to the standard so what reaches them is designed to pass, and we build the approval step into the timeline rather than discovering it. What we will not do is hold your permissions or approve anything ourselves. The regulatory duty stays with your firm either way, and an agency that blurs that is creating a risk rather than removing one.
The expensive failure is a design signed off on how it looks, with copy written last and reviewed by compliance a week before launch. Balance, prominence and proportion are structural, so fixing them then means moving the layout, not editing a sentence. The fix is to write the constrained pages first and let the design serve them.
No, and we are not one. What is needed is having worked inside the rules often enough to draft to them, and knowing where the edge is so we can say "that claim will not clear" before it costs a cycle. Square 4 Partners, an FCA regulatory compliance consultancy, is a client, which is a useful check on whether we understand the world we are writing for.
Sometimes, and we will tell you which makes sense. The deciding question is usually whether the current site can be changed quickly. A regulated firm whose site takes three weeks and an external developer to edit will publish nothing for years, and that is the real cost, not the build fee.
While you are subscribed it is live, hosted, maintained and improved. If you want the build outright and hosted elsewhere, there is a one-off buyout figure agreed in writing before you start.
Websites for a specific regulated sector
Same build discipline, written for the approval route each sector has.
Websites for accountancy practices
A prospective client judges your credibility in seconds. A generic, stock-photo site quietly costs you the work before anyone calls.
Websites for mortgage brokers
Written for the person at your network who has to approve it, so it clears sign-off first time instead of coming back marked up.
Want it found as well as built? SEO for financial services firms covers the ranking side. For the whole picture, see marketing for regulated firms.
Want a site your approver signs off first time?
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