Ask an independent adviser why they have not refreshed a website they know is dated, and the answer is rarely “I like it”. It is some version of: the last one cost more than it should have, took four months, involved endless content requests, and produced something that never generated anything. I am not doing that again on a promise.
That is a completely rational position. The traditional website buying process asks a firm to commit budget on the strength of a proposal document, a sitemap and some flat visual concepts — none of which tell you how the finished thing will actually feel or whether it will do anything for the business.
We think that is the wrong order. So we changed it.
For independent IFAs and mortgage brokers, Heer Digital builds a working homepage prototype at no cost and with no obligation.
Not a PDF. Not a static image of a homepage in a slide. A real, clickable page you can open on your phone, scroll, click through and show to a colleague — built around your firm, your client type, your independence and your actual services.
You look at it beside your current homepage. If it makes the case, we talk about what a full build looks like. If it does not, you keep the comparison and we part company. There is no fee, no proposal to sign first, and no obligation of any kind.
Two reasons, and both are worth understanding because they affect what you get afterwards.
The first is that modern build tooling has changed the economics of the first draft. A high-fidelity, working homepage that would once have taken a designer and a front-end developer a fortnight can now be produced in a fraction of that time. The expensive part of a website build was never the first page — it was everything that followed. So we give the first page away.
The second is self-interested and we will say it plainly: the prototype qualifies both of us. If we cannot produce something that clearly beats your current homepage, we should not be taking your money. Finding that out costs us a day and costs you nothing.
Firms are often surprised by which questions the exercise answers.
Whether the problem is design or positioning. Frequently the site is not ugly — it is vague. Seeing the same firm described with a sharp, specific proposition makes the difference immediately obvious in a way that no audit document does.
What the homepage is currently costing you. An abstract “our site is a bit old” becomes concrete when you can flick between two versions on a phone. Most firms know within ten seconds.
Whether you actually want to publish. Looking at a real page, you get a fast instinct for whether you would ever add to it. That single instinct determines the right build — and it saves firms from buying a content management system they will never open.
How your independence reads. Directly authorised firms consistently underplay this. Seeing “whole of market, no parent company, no panel” as a headline rather than a footnote changes how firms think about their own positioning, whether or not they work with us.
Around twenty minutes. We want to know who your ideal client is, what you want a visitor to do, what makes your firm different from the firm down the road, and any regulatory constraints you work within. We look at your current site and your competitors ourselves.
We do not need finished copy, a brand guideline document, or a committee decision. That is the point.
The build scales to the firm, and the two routes are genuinely different products at genuinely different prices.
The low-cost route: a fast site with no content management system. The prototype is finished and deployed as a small, extremely fast set of pages. Nothing to update, nothing to maintain, no plugins, no security patching. This suits a two or three adviser practice that wants a credible, modern, high-converting presence and has no intention of publishing articles. It is the cheapest route to a site that no longer embarrasses you, and it can be live quickly.
The WordPress route: the same design, converted into a system you control. We rebuild the approved prototype as a full WordPress site. You get an editor for pages and posts, adviser profiles you can add and amend, landing pages you can create for specific case types, proper SEO tooling, form handling and integrations, and a content base that builds search and AI-search visibility over time. It costs more and it earns more, but only if you will actually use it — which is exactly what the prototype conversation establishes.
Firms sometimes start with the first and convert to the second a year later. That is a legitimate path, and because the design is already resolved, it is a far cheaper move than a second rebuild from scratch.
We will not tell you that you need a website rebuild if the honest answer is that a few targeted fixes to your existing site would do more for less. Some firms leave this conversation with a short list of changes to make themselves. That is a perfectly good outcome.
If you run an independent, directly authorised IFA practice or mortgage brokerage, and your website has not been meaningfully refreshed in the last few years, we will build you a working homepage prototype at no cost and no obligation so you can see the alternative rather than imagine it.
You have nothing to lose except the twenty minutes it takes to brief us.
Contact Heer Digital to book your no-cost homepage prototype.
