For example Currencies, major indicies etc  http://www.wikinvest.com/currency/U.S._Dollar_(USD) , DJIA http://www.wikinvest.com/index/Dow_Jones_Industrial_Average_(DJI) 
http://www.wikinvest.com/commodity/Gold Gold
http://www.wikinvest.com/commodity/Coffee Coffee

and more…

We continue our collection of free resources for website owners in the financial service industry and today focus on various resources that offer free forex markets data and tools. We noticed that all or most top FX clearing firms are starting to provide free content as a way to attract IBs to clear through them. Content that used to cost a fortune via providers such as QuoteMedia and others now is free with link to clearing firms website. Any FX IB brokerage firm that is designing a website can take advantage of these places to enrich their users experience.

Following free FX content providers are popular and available to be used on your forex trading website:

CMS Forex
http://www.forexwebtools.com
Great collection of all kinds of tools at no cost
Charts, quotes, PIP, Currency, Notional Value Calculators, Calendar

Forex4You
http://www.forexpros.com/webmaster-tools/
Economic calendar, Rates, News, Live Quotes, Exchange Rates, Charts, Indexes, Commodities, Converter

AC-Markets
http://www.ac-markets.com/webmaster-resources/free-forex-tools.aspx
Live exchange rates, converter, news

FXDD
http://www.fxdd.com/en/webmaster-tools.html
Calculator generator, ticker, vertical currency ticker, news and commentary widget

Forex Factory
http://www.forexfactory.com/excal.php
Calendar

Finotec
http://www.finotec.com/trading-tools.php
Converter, Quotes, Calendar, Support/resistance, signals, news

Are you interested in forex website design? Contact LightMix to receive a proposal. LightMix provided design for FX and trading companies for over 10 years, we’ll be glad to work with your organization.

We recommend that a first step is for organization to review examples of corporate identity guidelines, branding guides and style guides from other companies before deciding on how to approach their ID redesign. A great resource to see examples of how your corporate identity can be documented is located here: http://www.designerstalk.com/corpid

Thanks to the article http://www.graphicdesignblog.co.uk/corporate-identity-guidelines/ this resource and others referenced will help your organization to do needed research and planning before starting branding and identity redesign project.

The next step is to proceed with preparatory phase, generate list of goals, requirements and select service provider that can demonstrate expertise in the field, solid portfolio and understanding of marketing goals of your organization. Decide if your organization needs just a simple identity, logo or more extended corporate identity guidelines, style guide.

It is important to stress that corporate clients lack full understanding of all implications of branding, identity. Balanced approach to brand marketing takes into account all aspects of user interaction and experience with identity, brand, products.

Contact LightMix to receive a free consultationa nd a proposal for your brand remake

Website design checklist, logo design checklist, marketing checklist, search engine optimization checklist, application design checklist, usability checklist.. they are many of them out there. Visit this article you can get a load of checklists for whatever you want. Will they necessarily help you to have a better product in the end? Not always, not likely if your overall approach to a project is wrong. What we try to establish from the start of the design is to make sure that customer doesn’t lead the design process too much so that designers participation is limited to just technically following advice and direction of a customer without regard for professional opinion. It is often problematic to convince a client that spent considerable amount of time on self education that in fact this may not be best way to go about presenting marketing content, one way or another.

 All of the checklists that you find, and we often use some, should always be used for one purpose only -  planning and initial information. They should never be used as a guide, tool, reference. If they do and if a customer tries to stick to the irrelevant opinion of others the rest will be just that -  irrelevant design that will fail to address main requirements of the project.

Click here to talk to us and to receive a checklist that will make sense and to start a project that will deliver the result.

When designing a website for introducing brokers, we suggest to foloow following basic guidelines to create effective web presence that converts website visitors into leads and accounts.

Basic rules for website creation for introducing broker:

1. Do not try to copy other IB websites. All introducing brokers are in similar position and often we see that many want a site like somebody else. Each project has to be done custom to your firms objectives, be built around your strengths, so you can capitalize on that.

2. Try to take advantage of the content you are provided by your clearing firm, but do not base your site content exclusively on that. Often clearing firms will offer educational website content or any other marketing content at no cost. Use that, but only as supporting content. There is limited value in that, it does help you build up credibility, but also same to content on other brokers websites.

3. Always go with custom website design, never try to use templated websites. We wrote an article hereon why templated sites are not be used, make sure you read it.

4. Pay special attention to branding. In tight competition with other brokers, generic name and branding will mean customers won’t remember you.

5. Build your own lead generation section to store all leads in multiple forms in your database. Do now rely exclusively on provided open account section provided by your clearing form. Create generic lead gen forms that allow you to capture customers leads. Use that later to extract leads for email marketing.

6. Create full scale campaign, do not try to limit eforts to website only. Banners, ads in print, media all will help to promote your brand.

7. Most importantly, do not expect that a site can be designed with all of the conditions above for $1,000. Money you put into your branding and website design turns back multiple times as it helps you to close more accounts. When we suggest website design we stress VALUE above all, and in case with introducing brokers website design, value is perceived partially by how the site looks, how serious it is, effective marketing message is. Think about price of a website as investment in your own property’s equity. 100% of the cost is going toward your equity.

Contact LightMix to receive a proposal for your website for your introducing broker site for commodities, futures, equities, forex brokerage business

Marketing website on popular networks comes down to populating your content with keywords targeted to the right audience and selecting appropriate language, keywords and conversion mechanism that enables you bring customers to the website and converts them into leads and later in clients.

Tweeting about subjects related to your prospects search items will make your posts and tweets appear in search results in various systems like tweetdeck and others. API access to twitter and other social media networks enables rapid development of applications and integration mechanisms that take content from the networks into many other places thus spreading reach of relevant posts. Post often and on important subjects.

Click here to request an estimat efor professional website design and marketing consultation

Partially, this depends on the company and on the industry, but mostly, on knowledge of a person who is interested in services. True professionals of online marketing realize enormous possibility to increase business in just about any field by creating web presence which compliments and expands their brand reach to users online. Customers that have more traditional brick and mortar businesses rarely possess such in-depth understanding and, therefore, look for services provided at a discount or low cost. They try to find somebody who will offer services at lowest cost with “acceptable” quality, not with highest value to their business. The problem on this approach is that acceptable quality is a relevant term. There are options for any budget, and it can be hard to know the difference. Don’t settle for anything less then 1% of your revenue, best options are 5-12% for website budget.

Our recommendation is that before anyody even starts vendor selection process, its critical to educate yourself about process that it takes to create a typical website and what options exist on the market today. Decide what tier of professional design companies you want to work with. Go for value above all. Professional portfolio, references and open ended design process without fixed number of reviews is important.

Contact LightMix to receive a custom proposal for your site redesign.

It’s often a question that many companies have to struggle with due to ever increasing complexities of today’s reporting and statistics. Struggling to combine results form multiple processes, operations and at the same time enable key users of the dashboard to be able to make necessary actions can be a challenging task. Basic training is not enough to foresee problems and propose solution that can accomplish multiple goals.

Dashboard design organizer / dashboard checklist:

1. Assess that dashboard needs a redesign.
2. Key executives of the organization must come to joint conclusion that a current presentation of the data is poor and doesn’t work to present key statistics.
3. A management decision should be reached to engage consulting firms to help coordinate and facilitate dashboard redesign process.
4. Generate requirement documentation and list all current functional characteristics of your application.
5. Consulting firms submit bids, a vendor is selected and redesign process is under way.
6. Upon first series of prototypes, management decides to choose one of the design directions that reflects organization current and future requirements and consulting firm develops dashboard, coordinates or does technical integration.
7. Final dashboard design is delivered for integration or installed on live application.
8. After initial installation iterative design process can occur, larger organizations may go through multiple review stages before launching redesign with targeted focus groups to gather feedback on dashboard effectiveness, consistency and so on.
9. As a result of this final design is reached and new application dashboard is enabled.
10. Short term usability testing and long terms usability studies are done to generate report showing effectiveness of redesign.
11. Redesign effectiveness is measured.

 Are you interested in professional dashboard redesign or redesign of your intranet or web application interface?

Contact LightMix for more samples and a free proposal.

http://thefinancialbrand.com/2009/11/09/branson-launches-virgin-bank/

In this port we want to examine differences and benefits of custom design vs ready to use dashboards. There are many applications and providers claiming easy to use and plug and play dashboard functionality that easily integrates in framework of your application. True, to some degree ready to use products can correspond to many needs of users that are not particularly interested in getting to the bottom of the real problems of operation of their organization. Due to recent cost cutting and constrains many companies dramatically reduce budgets and custom design services often first to go in favor of ready to use applications that provide some sense of information, intelligence despite lack of custom and well thought out approach.

But lets concentrate for a moment on such approach and see ow theoretically a typical organization can sustain growth and development of customer satisfaction with their products when relying only on partial and often not coherent informatics about key performance indicators and drivers of business.

Dashboard designer, capable of laying out effective informational architecture that is tied to the organization infrastructure and helping reduce analytical costs b optimizing methods with which executives make critical business decisions is far more effective and important then saving a few thousand dollars and going with of the shelf package that come with ready to use dashboards.

Same analogy can be applied to template-based websites. Templatemonster.com, many others devalue creative cost to 0 by essentially offering walmart of pick your own ideas that don’t to represent anything in particular. Customers and being sold on their own lack of knowledge and this can be a dangerous mistake when enterprise performance is involved.

Retain capable interface and user experience dashboard designer to avoid costly mistakes. Your shareholders will be thankful in the long term!

Contat LightMix for custom proposal for dashboard design