CPA and accountant website design in Des Moines
Websites for Des Moines accounting firms from $499 — built for the twelve weeks that decide your year, and yours to own outright.
Since 2011 · You own everything · Price published, not quoted after a call
Last updated July 2026
A Des Moines CPA website needs clear service and audience pages, secure document exchange, and structure that holds up when tax-season traffic arrives all at once. The busy months decide the year, so the site has to convert in January and stay useful in July. Ours start at $499; portals and integrations are quoted separately.
What an accounting firm website needs that a generic business site does not
Two things: a way to move documents safely, and pages that distinguish the services you sell from the ones you tolerate.
Accounting firms sell several genuinely different things — individual returns, business returns, bookkeeping, payroll, advisory, audit support — to buyers who have nothing in common. A single “Services” page listing all of them is the default and it is why so many firm sites underperform: the person searching for small-business bookkeeping in Des Moines never sees a page about that.
The second thing is document handling. Clients will try to email tax documents whether or not you want them to, and a website that gives them an obvious secure route reduces both the risk and the number of phone calls. That is a real feature with real cost, which is why it is scoped separately rather than implied.
- A page per service, because individual returns and business advisory are different sales
- Audience pages where they earn their keep — small business, self-employed, landlords
- A secure document route, quoted separately because it is a genuine build
- Clear statements about who you take on, and when your books are closed
- Pricing or at least pricing structure, which almost no firm publishes
Building for tax season: the twelve weeks that decide the year
Nobody else competing for this search says a word about the one fact that governs your business.
An accounting firm’s website has a demand curve unlike almost any other business. From January to April it takes the traffic of a much larger company; for the rest of the year it is comparatively quiet. Most firm sites are built as though demand were flat, which produces two avoidable problems.
The first is capacity, and it is not about servers. It is that in February you may not want more individual-return inquiries at all — you may want the opposite, and you certainly want the inquiries you do get to be the right ones. A site that cannot say “we are at capacity for individual returns this season, here is what we are still taking” costs you goodwill with people you have to turn away, and you should be able to change that yourself in two minutes without calling anyone.
The second is the other nine months. Advisory, bookkeeping and payroll are the work most firms actually want more of, and they are bought outside the rush by people who are not thinking about deadlines. Those pages need to exist, be findable on their own terms, and not be buried under the seasonal material that dominates the site in March.
None of this is difficult. It is a matter of deciding, before the site is built, that it has two jobs at different times of year — and building the seasonal parts so you can change them yourself.
Des Moines and West Des Moines accounting firms we build for
A metro with an unusually deep bench of finance and insurance employers has an unusually deep bench of accountants serving them.
Central Iowa’s concentration of insurance and financial-services employers produces a large professional-services layer beneath it, and West Des Moines in particular carries a dense cluster of accounting and advisory practices along its office corridors. Warren County’s seat at Indianola supports another, smaller concentration of the kind a courthouse town always has.
The practical consequence is that your prospects are comparison shoppers with real alternatives, and often enough financially literate to judge you on how clearly you explain things. That favors firms willing to be specific about who they serve and how they charge — which is uncomfortable and is exactly why so few competitors do it.
The largest and most searched-for segment, and the one most often buried under a generic services list. Deserves its own page written in the client’s language, not the profession’s.
The work most firms want more of, bought outside tax season by people not thinking about deadlines. It needs pages that stand on their own.
Recurring, relationship-led and highly comparison-shopped. Clarity about what is included and what it costs does most of the selling.
Competing against larger firms on responsiveness and access. Naming the person who will actually do the work is the advantage a big firm cannot copy.
Every site is built by Elisabeth Samuels and the Salterra team — a company building websites since 2011. Not a reseller, not an offshore queue. The same person who scopes your project writes the pages and hands over the logins.
That one number is enough to price a build. Send it with what the firm does and you get a figure and a timeline back in writing.
What a CPA website costs in Des Moines
Published up front, which is not the norm in a profession that mostly quotes on request.
Up to 15 pages starts at $499. Sixteen to 50 pages starts at $999. Fifty-one or more starts at $1,499. Those are starting figures for a written, structured, accessible site.
Most firms here need the first tier or the second: a page per service, a few audience pages, the practical information and a way to get in touch. We will tell you if that is the case rather than pad the count.
What moves it: a secure client portal or document-exchange system is a real build and is quoted separately — we scope it before giving you a number. The full breakdown is on the pricing page.
What moves the number
- Page count — the honest driver, because every page is written and structured individually
- A secure client portal or document exchange — a separate build, always quoted individually
- An integration with software you already run — quoted separately, because we scope that before giving you a number rather than after
- Seasonal controls you can change yourself — small to build, and worth it by February
- Content — if copy and photographs are ready it moves faster; if we write everything from scratch it takes longer
Frequently asked questions about CPA web design in Des Moines
What does a CPA website cost in Des Moines?
From $499 for up to 15 pages, $999 for 16–50, and $1,499 for 51 or more. Most firms need the first or second tier. A secure document portal is quoted separately because that work is not predictable from a page count.
Can you build a secure client document portal?
We build this, and it is quoted separately because the work is not predictable from a page count — we scope it before giving you a number. A normal build includes secure contact and file-submission forms, which is enough for many firms; a full portal with logins is a different thing and we would rather say so than let a $499 figure imply otherwise.
Can the site handle tax-season traffic?
Yes, and the more useful question is what it should say during those weeks. The valuable part is being able to change the site yourself in February — to say you are at capacity for individual returns, or that you are still taking business clients — without waiting on a developer during your busiest month.
Should we publish our prices?
At least the structure. Almost no firm does, which is exactly why it works: it answers the question every prospect has, and it filters out the ones who were never going to proceed. You do not have to publish a full schedule to get most of the benefit.
We want more advisory work and fewer one-off returns. Can the site help?
That is mostly a structural question. Advisory, bookkeeping and payroll need their own pages that can be found on their own terms, rather than sitting under a services list dominated by seasonal work. It is one of the clearest cases where page structure directly changes the mix of inquiries you get.
Who owns the website when it is finished?
You do. The domain is registered in your name, the hosting is opened under your billing, and any premium license is bought on your account rather than ours. If you leave there is nothing to migrate — you remove our login.
Tell us what you sell. Get your number.
Send us what your business does and roughly how many pages you think you need. You will get the number and a timeline in writing.
