Finvantis
A newly incorporated Singapore financial advisory firm needed credibility fast. We built a bilingual-ready WordPress site around four core services, on a startup budget, launched in eight weeks.
Finvantis now has a bilingual-ready WordPress site, built in eight weeks around the founder's travel schedule, that turns networking conversations into qualified enquiries.
What we were solving
Finvantis was one month old when the project started. Founder Ashley Tan had spent 20+ years in multinational finance across APAC before setting up her own firm, offering fractional CFO, accounting, tax advisory and corporate secretarial services to Singapore startups, SMEs and regional corporates. The experience was real. The company’s track record, on paper, was four weeks long. That gap was the whole problem.
Prospects meeting Ashley at networking events would look the firm up and find nothing. The site had to carry the credibility of a 20-year career on a startup budget, and serve English and Mandarin markets from day one. Ashley was also travelling through September, so every design decision had to be locked in by August.
Success was defined at kickoff: a presence that converts networking into qualified leads, clear presentation of the four core services, and room to expand into IT and security services later. The business goal behind it was a first set of paying clients signed by year end.
How we tackled it
Front-load the decisions, build during the silence
We structured the project around Ashley’s September travel. Strategy, information architecture and visual design were compressed into August, so development could run for four weeks while she was away, with review and testing on her return. No decision was left open while she travelled. Client time was kept to roughly 10-12 hours in total. Launch landed in early October, six to eight weeks after kickoff.
A small stack the founder can run
The build used Beaver Builder with Advanced Custom Fields, which keeps page templates editable without a developer, and WPML for the English and Mandarin capability (translation stayed out of scope, but the multilingual plumbing shipped ready). The site runs on Chillybin Cloud hosting in the Singapore region, with SSL, daily backups and uptime monitoring included. The architecture maps three user journeys identified at kickoff: international companies researching Singapore incorporation, SMEs looking for financial management, and prospects checking Ashley out after meeting her.
Write the credibility the client couldn’t claim yet
With no case studies or testimonials to lean on, the content had to do the persuading. Professional copywriting was out of scope on this budget, so we provided AI-drafted content documents for the homepage and each service page, with our recommendations and the reasoning alongside. The homepage leads with the founder’s 20+ years of APAC experience and Chartered Accountant credentials rather than the company’s age. Each service page follows a problem, solution, packages structure with Singapore-specific detail: GST filing, IRAS requirements, ACRA compliance.
What we delivered
Finvantis now has a full site at finvantis.biz covering all four service lines where there was no web presence before. SEO foundations (meta titles, descriptions, sitemap, Google Analytics) and spam-protected enquiry forms were in place at launch, with a year of starter maintenance included. Ashley takes over content updates herself after a one-hour live training session backed by video tutorials, so the site grows with the firm without a developer in the loop.
What we learned
A brand-new professional services firm doesn’t need a big site. It needs seven pages doing one job: making a founder’s track record legible to strangers who just Googled the company. Leading with the person’s credentials, not the company’s history, is the honest version of credibility for a month-old firm.
The travel constraint turned out to be a feature. Compressing every decision into August meant no mid-build design churn, and the 48-hour feedback cycles agreed at kickoff held because the window was fixed.
The team behind this project
Shaan Nicol
Director
Roaldo Felipe
Project Manager
Salman Tahir
Junior Designer
Jade Romano
Web Developer
