The price of building a custom CPA and Accounting website design can speedily spiral out of control, but if you understand a few simple tricks you can meaningfully trim, if not eliminate, your set-up expenses.

Personally I recommend using a template rather than investing in a custom designer.

Once you've considered all your options and you've decided you really want your website to be unique, there are still a couple of great tricks for avoiding the expense and hassle of a $2000 to $3000 full blown custom website design. Consider modifying an existing template, or combining the best features of two or more existing templates to create a new, completely unique one.

The cheapest and easiest way to customize a template is to change the header image. You can see a picture or image on the top of a lot of accounting website designs. That picture can easily be replaced with one of your own. Colors, fonts and menus are also easily modified on most templates. These are great yet inexpensive ways to get a great looking custom site and it won't cost more than $250 to $300.

Another dirty trick that works really well is combining elements of different sites and cobbling them together into a whole new website design. Ive done this before on a number of occasions. One client in particular, Bernstein Rosen & Company CPAs PC, stands out in my memory.

On the Bernstein job the first website design had a graphic element they really liked. It's very stylized and brightly colored. It shows four people working together building a puzzle bridge to success. Bernstein worked with our custom designer who took the elements of the people with the puzzle going to Success and changed the color to blend with the other website design. A totally different website provided the overall structure of the customization. When it was done it had the elegance the firm had been looking for, but it also retained the "movement" of the puzzle graphic. This gave the whole design a perfect touch of fun. The final result is outstanding. It really looks and feels unique, and it cost them a portion of what they would have needed to pay for a real custom accounting website design.

Pretty simple, yes? If you'd rather not use a standard template, but you don't want to to spring for an altogether custom accounting website design, there's a great compromise available.