Some of the new featuers of Version 3 of the HedgeCo Website Platform are:

Multiple Fund Aware: The new version of the platform has built in support for multiple hedge funds. This means that when you add a new Fund to your product our team can have it enabled the same day.

Fund type categorization: As part of the multiple fund functionality, funds can be categorized based on type (master, feeder, currency class, manager previous track record, etc.)

New Graphs: Risk / Return Graphs, Performance during up/down index months, distribution of returns, and more.

Multiple Benchmark handling.

Email your investors using powerful templates.

New quantitative and return statistics

Permission based access settings.

This new version has already been implemented on dozens of sites ranging from Fund of Funds to CTA funds and more.

Prior to working with HedgeCo Website Creations, the existing website was a static html site which was updated with PDF files of the various products. There were several issues other than the website design that needed to be addressed in the relaunch.

1. Easy updating of content (no more HTML editing)

2. Ability to create textual versions of various products and display them alongside the PDF version

3. Flexibility to add new sections, products, and articles.

Because the scope of the project was substantially different than what we deliver with our Hedge Fund website platform, we chose ezPublish as the Content Management System on top of which we could build the Tuttle Asset Management site.

The HedgeCo Hedge Fund Website team has experience with a variety of different Content Management System platforms.

1. Commercial Support: eZpublish has a large support team and will support the platform.

2. Solid Upgrade Path: eZsystems has a solid upgrade path for the eZpublish platform and this includes an exciting next-generation platform which is based on the upcoming PHP6.

3. Flexibility in design: The HedgeCo Hedge Fund Website team prides itself in the ability to create designs that fit exactly to what our clients needs are. eZpublish does not place any restrictions on our ability to do this. The eZpublish platform also provides the programming tools that our programmers need in creating any customizations

4. Personal Experience: In the summer of 2006 I was able to attend the eZpublish Conference in Skein, Norway. During this time I was able to fully evaluate the product as well as interact with the core developers and management team.

Specifications

Following are some of the unique aspects of the Tuttle Asset Management website:

1. Dynamic graphical page headers

2. Flexible Category and Page creation

3. PayPal integration to sell specific products from the website

4. Integration with Google Maps

5. Technical glossary section with terms grouped in alphabetical order

6. Integration with external CRM solution

7. RSS Output

Design Phase

Once the project specification was laid out, we moved into the design phase. Surej was the contact during this phase and worked

Issues

During the deployment phase there were some issues which we faced that pushed back the schedule for the launch date of the site. These issues involved some sections of the specification which had not been given enough attention prior to the implementation phase. There were also issues where eZpublish provided features which were not needed by the website editing team at Tuttle Asset Management, and changes were made to ensure that the appropriate functionality was presented in a way that it would be of most use to the website team.

Initially in the deployment we planned to create highly customized templates for each of the products which were featured on the website, however after the initial round of revisions we settled on two distinct product templates. While customized templates offered a much greater amount of flexibility on our part, it made it difficult for the Tuttle Asset Management team to create new products, as we would need to provide the original designs. Having two templates gave the flexibility that was needed.

Deployment

One of the challenges faced by the deployment of the Tuttle Asset Management site involved the entry of historical data into the new website system. With over 200 specific articles in the “Morning Cup of Jo” section the converting them to a textual format is not a simple task. For the initial website launch the team focused on a few recent articles, and we will be adding documents for the site retroactively for historical purposes.

Finally I would like to thank Greg Collins and the other folks who patiently worked with us over both the design and website implementation cycles. This was a big project, and we’re happy with the results.

Phillip Goldstein, the activist fund manager who successfully blocked rules requiring hedge funds to register with US regulators, is being sued by officials in Massachusetts who claim he improperly marketed his funds to unqualified investors.

The complaint alleges Mr Goldstein’s Bulldog Investors and other related entities violated US securities regulations for private placements by failing to restrict access to “general advertising and offering materials” on its hedge fund website, according to a statement by William Galvin, secretary of the commonwealth for Massachusetts.

Mr Goldstein did not re-turn a call seeking comment.

“If the regulators were to do an extensive search of public internet sites for hedge funds and related entities, they would no doubt find a whole host of violations,'’ said one hedge fund lawyer. He added that many hedge fund companies were unclear as to what was allowed.

Mr Goldstein and Bulldog Investors failed to control access to fund information that should have been available only to password-holders screened by fund managers, according to the complaint.

A disclaimer on a Bulldog Investors website said users must agree that information it contained did not constitute a solicitation, according to Mr Galvin’s statement. Such a disclaimer, it added, did “not constitute an appropriate or adequate control over a publicly accessible website that displays advertising and/or offering materials for securities”.

Citing an interview with Mr Goldstein, Bloomberg said the information in question that Bulldog provided to an individual was given based on a misrepresentation of the person’s intentions.

Mr Goldstein scored a big win against the Securities and Exchange Commission last year when he won a lawsuit challenging the right of the regulator to require hedge fund advisers to register with it. The rules were thrown out as a result.

This lawsuit re-enforces the necessity of fully compliant websites, something that the HedgeCo Website Creation team has made a priority of from day one.

We are in the process of setting up a compliance section on this website which will serve as a document and knowledge repository for anyone interested in the exact process for creating a fully compliant Hedge Fund website.

The HedgeCo Website team, is available at all times to answer questions regarding Hedge Fund Website compliance issues.
Contact us at: 561 835 8690

GEM Capital is pleased to announce the launch of its new website – www.gemcapital.com.

Designed to be a “go-to” place to learn about strategies offering tax-efficient investing, www.gemcapital.com contains information on the following:

• Tax Efficient Investing: Objective evaluations of alternative investment opportunities offering tax-free income
• Investment Solutions: Information on services offered by GEM Capital
• Relevant News and Events:  Listing of industry events and news articles

Membership is free, and required to access sections of the site that offer detailed information on municipal bond arbitrage, traditional high-quality municipal bonds, high-yield municipal bonds as well as specific information pertaining to services offered by GEM Capital. 

Our aim is to provide education and investment solutions to individuals interested in tax-efficient investing. The first two sections of this website, “About GEM Capital” and “Tax Efficient Investing” contain general information on tax efficient investing, and encompass all that GEM offers. The remaining sections of the site provide information specific to one investment solution — municipal bond arbitrage.

Please contact GEM with any questions or for additional information.

Sincerely,

The GEM Capital Team

GEM Capital, LLC

83 Beach Road
Belvedere, CA  94920
p: (415) 563-3844
info@gemcapital.com

When setting up your mail accounts, you can use the SMTP (outgoing mail) servers which we provide with your account, these servers will take the form of “mail.example.com” example.com being the domain name at which your website resides. In some cases setting popular ISPs try to combat spam by restricting access to any SMTP server which they do not control.

This means that in many cases you will not be able to use our mail servers, but you have to point your SMTP server to the address provided by your ISP.

If you can’t access the SMTP server that we have provided you with, please check this list to see if your ISP is listed, or contact your ISP and ask them what SMTP server you should use.

I’ve just updated our Hedge Fund Website testimonials page with comments from some of the recent projects that we’ve completed.

It was great working with Neal Goyal on the website for his hedge fund Blue Horizon Asset Management. We are in the final phases of rolling out the most recent project we’ve been working together on.

Roberts Capital was an interesting project in that it differed from many of the other projects that we completed.

Austin Roberts was very clear about his vision for the website, and speaking for the entire Hedge Fund Website team I can say that it was a pleasure working with him, and we wish him and his firm the best in the coming year.

We will keep our Testimonial page updated with client comments as they come in.

I will be presenting two talks. The first talk will be on Search Engine Optimisation and Website Accessiblity. In this talk we will be examining several websites through the eyes of a search engine and a screen reader.

The second talk will be an extension of the talk I gave at ZendCon on Upgrading to PHP5 with Style. This presentations skips some of the extremely technical aspects of PHP5 and focuses on the new aspects and features available in PHP5. Both of my talks will be based on experience and knowledge gained while working with the HedgeCo Hedge Fund Website team.
This will be my first PHP|Architect conference, and I’m looking forward to meeting up with some of the other distinguished speakers who will be presenting as well.

Capstone has been in business since 1993, and the existing website was launched in 2003. With the focus of the website changing, and the business growing Capstone needed to overhaul their website to reflect their new provides a number of service to their clients.

The needs were fairly straightforward

• Easy to update and maintain
• Easy to embed various media within any page
• Provide a Client Login with a protected client area
• Search Engine Friendly with the ability to change meta-tags on individual pages

Technology
To the casual observer the site appears to be a static HTML (HyperText Markup Language) site, however to create the dynamic nature of the site, some interesting technologies are used under the hood.

Because of the nature of this site, and the fact that it is different in nature to our HedgeCo Hedge Fund Website product, the programmers involved had to create a new platform designed specifically with the needs of Capstone in mind.

The site is based on PHP, and contains a front-controller which parses the requests and transfers them to a Smarty based template system. The template system makes heavy use of Smarty plugins which enables us to compile the various sections in each request then serve them back to the web-browser.

The website has two modes: viewing mode, and administrative mode. To enable simple website administration we made heavy use of the fantastic TinyMCE wysiwyg html editor from Moxicode AB. This system is based on advanced Javascript, and offers a word-like editing environment where users can very easily edit text without having to be concerned with the often-complex underlying HTML code. At HedgeCo Website Creation, we use TinyMCE a lot, however in this project we extended TinyMCE with several custom plugins which enabled administrators to embed various types of media into the website pages. This was then converted by Smarty plugins to display editable content when in administrative mode as editable text. Thanks to the excellent product by the good people at Moxicode AB the website now has a dynamic in-line editing functionality.

Client Section
The client section required a simple backend control panel to manage users who have requested access. Due to the modular nature of the HedgeCo Website Creation platform we were able to implement the robust user / email management panel in this site. This enables the administrator to have email alerts when users signup, and a control panel to manage the user access as well as email the user and share notes with other website administrators.

Search Engine Technologies
To enable optimum search engine friendliness several SEO techniques were used.
Custom Meta tags: Search engines use meta-tags to provide meta-information about the page being visited. Enable administrators to dynamically change these tags is essential in providing search engines with as much information as possible regarding your page.

Keyword Rich page headers: Adding keyword rich headers to your page acts as an visual aid to your visitors to give instant context to the information on the page as well as provides additional keywords which search engines will use when indexing the pages.

Header tags and Image replacement: Search engines look for html header tags to determine additional key words. From a design aspect this is often a problem because graphical headers are more aesthetically pleasing. To solve this problem we used the SIFR image replacement package, which replaces header text by good looking flash-based headers. This enables us to have text based headers, but display these headers as good looking graphical text.

In Conclusion

We are very happy with the way the website turned out, the dynamic nature of the site means that the editors are not constrained by issues that templated sites have. With the dynamic nature of the website editor they are able to add any type of media wherever they need to within the site framework.

Since we do work with optimizing the websites we create here at HedgeCo Hedge Fund Website Creation, he asked me to take a look at the blogging platform and see how it would preform against a platform like Blogger or a stand-alone application like Wordpress (which is the blogging engine that we use here at the HedgeCo Websites blog).
For this review, we will use Molly Hamacher, a character from Shadow Falls who has a fairly active blog as an example. I will mention “Google” a lot, this is only because this is the most popular search engine, my recommendations apply to all search engines however it is commonly accepted that if you optimizes for “Google” then the optimisations apply to other search engines as well.

1. Platform Overview & Internal Linking

When a user signs up with Podshow they get their “front page” the URL is a sub-domain of podshow.com. In Molly’s case this is http://mollysdiary.podshow.com/ this page contains “modules” which the user can selectively add to their page. One of the modules, is the “blog” which contains a list with the titles of the most recent blog entries. These modules are loaded using a Javascript “AJAX” call. Google does not parse javascript, and therefore, google sees no links exist between the podshow home page and the individual blog entries. This is proven by the google cache of this page.

The front page has html links (which Google recognises) to “blog posts” and “entourage”. The link to “blog posts” directs you to a page that lists the blog entries by the current user. The Entourage page contains links to other user’s home pages.

The purpose in using a social networking platform to boost your search engine rankings is to use the power of the interlinking system between users to direct search engines to the individual blog pages which contain the relevant information. The image below illustrates the path which a search engine will have to take to get from one users front page to another users blog entry.

Because of the lack of a good html link based navigation system there are too many “hops” between one user’s home page to another users blog entry to make this useful for search engines.

2. Blog Index Overview

The lack of a good internal linking strategy negates some of the benefits to choosing a social networking platform, like podshow, to host your blog. However, if you choose to use wordpress and host your own blog, you will not have any social networking bonus, so this is not a show-stopper.

We will now look at the format of the blog page. Molly Hamacher’s blog is here.

One of the most important parts of a blog entry is the title. The title generally contains key words regarding the content of the blog entry, and if you want to help search engines pick up your blog, you will want to choose a keyword intensive title and then make sure that the title text is the text being used as the anchor text used to link the blog index page with the blog entry itself. This helps google to associate the keyword rich title with the specific blog entry.

The Podshow blog platform does not do this, but instead only provides one link to the individual blog entry, this link has the anchor text of “Comments” which gives no semantic definition of the link to google.

Podshow does provide an alternate calendar based navigation, but due to the fact that it is based on javascript, does not provide any useful information to google.

Podshow does not provide any way to link to other blogs which would benefit search engine rankings.

3. Blog Page Overview

When you click on the “comments” link you can view the page dedicated to the specific blog entry. This is the most important page as it is the landing page which you want google to direct users to when they search for a relevant term. The more individual blog entries you have, the more pages google will index, and in turn the more people will come to your blog.

The html syntax that Podshow implements leaves a lot to be desired. Because we discussed the importance of the title above, it is important that the title is included in a header html tag. This tells google that the title text is important, and google will treat this as additional metadata when indexing the page. While Podshow does add this information into the title of the page, there is no coherent structure when it comes to the blog entries.

Search engine friendly URL’s are also an important part of giving Google extra metadata to work with. A URL structure would be something like:

http://mollysdiary.podshow.com/blog/1275/

or better yet:

http://mollysdiary.podshow.com/blog/dec-25/ (using the title to add meta-data)

instead it is:

http://www.podshow.com/blog/detail.php?persona=mollysdiary&postId=1275

This adds very little information for google, and in fact if you search for text specific to this post, only the index is displayed making this page all but invisible to google.

Podshow Plus does not provide any trackback method or any way to automatically ping blog aggregtors, it also does not provide a categorisation or tagging system which aggregators like technorati can take advantage of.

4. Recommendations

As a social networking tool Podshow plus makes a great place to post your podcasts and create blog entries, the community is active and you can target the highly specialized audience of Podshow Plus users. However, when marketing a product to a larger audience the cumbersomeness of the Javascript interface does not make the platform suitable for search engine marketing. Using social networking skills and creating interesting content will give you a large entourage within Podshow, but all those links will not provide additional leverage for the site and will therefore not translate into additional coverage by google.

By taking a few steps to make the blog system in Podshow Plus more accessible to search engines, Podshow will expand it’s presence in search engines and be able to create a platform which will not just be attractive to the current users of Podshow plus but will attract visitors through search engines who are outside the current demographic which is being targetted.

For more information, or a detailed technical review please contact the HedgeCo Websites support team.

Thanks to the initial press release we’ve already had a flood of interest in our product. I’ll try to keep the blog updated with the release annoucements, but at any given time we have between eight and ten sites in the pipeline. With an average of 2-3 site launches a week, I have a fair amount of real work to take care of and blogging may suffer.

While I’m here, I’ll put out a call for designers. We are in the market to hire a full time designer to work in our West Palm Beach office. Please contact jobs@hedgecowebsites.com for more information.