Forex Web Design

What to consider when building your brokerage website

In forex and CFD trading, many of your clients will never interact with you in person. They’ll never visit your office or get to know your staff. Instead, they’ll see your website, chat with your support team, and work with your brokers online. The online nature of the forex trading industry means that you need to have an excellent website to stand out from your competitors.

Just like a client would likely drive past a business in a run-down building without stopping, they’ll navigate away from a bad website.

Whether you’re creating a website for a new brokerage or redesigning your existing site, we have some tips to help you stand out.

Understand your technical capabilities

A variety of website building tools exist that make it easy for people without any computer coding skills to create an attractive and functional website. However, to add all of the customization you’ll likely want on your website for your forex brokerage, you will probably need to have some general computer skills and be willing to learn HTML. If you decide to use a website builder, look for one that is widely used so that there will be plenty of plugins and add-ons. Those tools will enable you to customize the site.

If you’d rather not create the website on your own, there are plenty of website building companies that can help you. Using a professional will cost more money. However, it will give you more options to customize the site, and the work can get done more quickly. When choosing a forex web design company, ask for the URLs of other sites that the company has designed. You can look at those sites to see if the company you’re considering has a design style that matches what you want. Make sure to discuss pricing for responsive design, CRM integration, and a trader’s room platform before you sign a contract.

Have a responsive design

Responsive web design means a site will work and look good whether the user is viewing it on a computer, tablet, or phone. Your clients are accustomed to accessing their favorite websites and accounts on all types of devices. If they’re browsing brokerage sites on their phone, and yours doesn’t look good because it was designed for a computer screen, they’ll move on.

If you’re designing your own website and want to do minimal technical work, look for a website builder like WordPress or Squarespace, which allows you to make your design responsive with the click of a button.

If you’re working with a professional website building company, ask whether there will be any extra costs associated with making their design for you responsive.

Use a currency rate ticker

Your website should convey the strong technical support clients will get if they sign up with your brokerage. You can put content on the site that tells them about your services, but your website can also show them.

For example, including custom live currency rate tickers can show that your brokerage is connected to constantly-updating information that will help them achieve the results that they want.

Although this kind of feature may look somewhat fancy, currency rate tickers are simple to install on most websites because several plugins exist. With this one from Exchange Rates, you can customize the ticker. Then, simply copy and paste some code to your site.

Integrate with your CRM & trader’s room

It should be simple for clients to get from your website to their account details and trading platform. For that to work, your site will need to integrate with your forex CRM and traders’ room software.

Include a large link to log in so that traders don’t need to search for a way to access their accounts. You should include this link whether you’re using the site primarily for marketing purposes or if you’re using it to provide information to existing clients. If one of your clients ends up on the marketing portion of your site, it should be easy for them get back to where they want to be.

Have an educational section

As with including high tech features, you can use content on the site to convey that your brokerage is trustworthy and helpful—that you want your clients to succeed. Consider devoting a section of your site to educational articles or videos. Regularly post things that will help your clients learn about foreign exchange trading and successful forex strategies.

If you have someone in-house who can write useful articles, your site will benefit from the original content. Just ask them to write 300-1,200 word articles on a specific topic that will help your clients and will add important keywords to your site.

If none of your employees are qualified to do that, you can use a content creation service. If you do outsource content creation, make sure to ask whether the service provides revisions for free, and if so, how many revisions you can request.

Support multiple languages and localization

If you work with clients from a large geographic area or plan to have IBs in different parts of the world, make sure your website is available in their language. The website should also automatically adjust the way times, dates, and currencies are shown to match the standard practice in the area where the website is being viewed.

Achieving localized and multilingual content may be a bit of a challenge if you’re building the website on your own and you don’t have much coding knowledge, and hiring a professional to help might be well worth the money.

There are some plugins that allow you to do this fairly easily if you built your site on a popular platform, like WordPress. Regardless of how your site is built, you’ll get the best translations if you pay for a human to manually translate the content, instead of relying on a machine translation, like Google Translate.

Your website is important for both attracting new clients and retaining existing ones. It’s one of the first things potential clients will see, and it tells them a lot about your brokerage firm. However, they’ll also spend a lot of time interesting with your CRM and trader’s room. If you’re looking for a new CRM, check out 11 Features in the Best Forex CRMs.