Case Study — Ongoing Contract (Oct 2021–Present)

Advisor Websites: Scalable UI/UX That Converts Financial Professionals at Scale

Ongoing contract design and development for a B2B SaaS platform that builds compliant, conversion-optimized websites for thousands of financial advisors, planners, and wealth managers.

Client Background

Advisor Websites is a B2B SaaS platform that designs, builds, and manages compliant websites for financial advisors, registered investment advisors, and independent wealth managers. The platform is now a Snappy Kraken company — reflecting the strategic alignment between advisor website infrastructure and marketing automation in the financial services space.

Their core product: a managed website platform that gives financial professionals a conversion-optimized web presence that meets compliance standards (FINRA, SEC), integrates with their CRM and marketing stack, and personalizes content to match their niche and clientele.

Their business challenge: converting financial advisor prospects who are highly discerning, compliance-conscious, and accustomed to evaluating vendors through the same analytical lens they apply to investment products. The sales process is consultative and multi-touch. The website’s job is to qualify and warm those prospects before the first sales conversation.

The Problem: Scaling Design Without Sacrificing Quality

As Advisor Websites grew — both in customer base and product complexity — the design demands grew with it. The platform needed:

• High-converting acquisition pages for financial advisor prospects: pages that positioned Advisor Websites as the category-leading platform over DIY alternatives and generic website builders.
• UX design for onboarding and product flows that reduced time-to-value for new advisors — reducing churn and improving NPS by getting advisors to their first “wow moment” faster.
• Marketing design assets that maintained brand consistency across email campaigns, paid social, conference materials, and in-platform UI — at the pace a growing SaaS company requires.
• Template and component design for the advisor-facing product itself — website templates that financial professionals could customize to their niche while remaining compliant and conversion-optimized.

The Approach

As a Contract UI/UX Designer and Developer, I embedded within the Advisor Websites team to provide consistent, high-quality design execution across four distinct workstreams:

1. B2B Acquisition Landing Pages

I designed and built landing pages for the financial advisor acquisition funnel — targeting advisors searching for phrases like “website for financial advisors,” “compliant advisor website,” and “financial advisor marketing platform.”

Each page was structured around the financial advisor’s specific decision criteria: compliance certification, personalization capability, SEO performance for advisor websites, CRM integration, and the quality of the template library. These aren’t generic website-buyer concerns — they’re industry-specific objections that required deep familiarity with the financial advisor market to address credibly in design and copy.

CTA architecture was designed around a “Book a Demo” primary goal with secondary goals around free trial activation — recognizing that financial advisor firms have multiple stakeholders in the technology decision and require different entry points for different buyer roles (advisor owner vs. office manager vs. compliance officer).

2. UX Design for Advisor Onboarding

I worked on UX flows for the advisor onboarding and site setup experience — the critical post-purchase phase where trial-to-paid conversion is won or lost.

The core UX principle applied: reduce the number of decisions between sign-up and the advisor’s first live page. Financial advisors are busy professionals who allocated a finite window to their website setup. Every additional form field, upload step, or configuration choice is an opportunity for abandonment.

UX improvements focused on progressive disclosure (surfacing the minimum required inputs first), smart defaults (pre-populating fields based on advisor license type), and visual feedback loops (progress indicators that make the completion feel achievable and close).

3. Website Template Design for Financial Advisors

Beyond the platform’s own marketing pages, I contributed to the design of website templates that financial advisors use as the foundation of their own web presence. These templates needed to satisfy several competing requirements simultaneously:

• Conversion-optimized for the advisor’s prospective clients (typically high-net-worth individuals, pre-retirees, business owners)
• Customizable to reflect the advisor’s brand, niche, and voice
• Compliant with FINRA and SEC website content standards
• Accessible per WCAG 2.1 guidelines — essential for financial services ADA compliance
• Performant: fast load times to support the SEO performance that advisors depend on for local organic discovery

4. Marketing Design & Graphic Assets

On an ongoing basis, I designed marketing assets supporting Advisor Websites’ demand generation activities: email campaign headers and templates, social media graphics for LinkedIn and Facebook, conference and event materials, and in-platform feature announcement graphics.

The challenge here was speed combined with quality: the marketing team needed assets quickly to support campaigns, but every asset needed to meet the premium brand standard appropriate for a company selling to financial professionals who evaluate visual quality as a proxy for operational competence.

Tools & Technologies

Key Expertise Demonstrated

• B2B financial services UX: Designing for financial professionals requires understanding their compliance environment, their risk tolerance in technology adoption, and the decision-making dynamics of a regulated practice. Generic UX frameworks don’t translate to this sector without significant adaptation.
• Multi-stakeholder B2B conversion design: Financial advisor technology purchases involve multiple decision-makers — the advisor, their operations staff, and often a compliance officer. Landing pages designed for this dynamic need to speak to each role’s specific concerns without diluting the primary conversion goal.
• Product UX within a SaaS onboarding context: Onboarding UX is a distinct discipline from marketing UX — it requires understanding activation metrics, time-to-value frameworks, and the psychology of commitment escalation in a subscription product.
• Template design systems at scale: Building website templates that give end-users creative flexibility while maintaining the design quality and compliance integrity the platform promises is a significant design systems challenge.

“A financial advisor’s website is the digital equivalent of their office reception. It communicates professionalism, credibility, and trust before a single word of advice is spoken. Designing for that context is a responsibility, not just a brief.”

— Joshua Jackai, Jackai Agency

Further Reading

Case Study: Snappy Kraken B2B Web Design →

The Anatomy of a High-Converting B2B Landing Page →

Conversion Rate Optimization for B2B Service Businesses →