Investor Relations

Investor relations (IR) web sites have their own unique set of requirements which we have devleoped for a number of sites such as

Our content management system is well suited to this type of application.  The key requirements are:

Compliance statement

There will be a requirement for visitors to agree to a compliance statement before they access the reports.  The content can be set on a global basis or even per page.  It can be set up to appear as a pop-up box or in-line.  If the end-user bookmarks a page and returns to it in another session they will have by-passed the pop-up.  The program therefore falls back on an in-line presentation.

Share price

Share prices will be provided by an external information provider.  In many cases the information provider will create page on their web site for the company (or we will use an existing page).  The IR site will simply link through to that information or show it in a frame.  The price provider may brand the data or it may be a neutral presentation, which is branded by placing it inside a frame.

For Paladin Resources (http://www.paladinresources.co.uk/) we wrote a program that reads the share price from the HemScott web site and re-presents them as part of the home page. This has to be done with the co-operation of the price provider as we depend on their page being structured in a fixed format.  As you can see this gives a very acceptable result not constrained by the aesthetics of the price provider’s web site.

Report and Accounts

These are frequently presented as pdf documents or web pages.  If the need is to present complex tables as web pages then the system allows the HTML to be developed outside the system and then uploaded to be included in the web page.

Going forward we are tracking the development of XBRL (eXtended Business Reporting Language).  This is an XML standard which allows the financial information to either be presented as a native XML file, or embedded in a web page.  It allows a computer program to extract the financial figures from the web site without having to understand how a particular human-readable web page is set up.  We have no specific XBRL functions at this time, however the client can upload XBRL files with the existing software.

Press releases

These can be uploaded by the client either as formatted documents or from Stock Exchange RNS format (which is much simpler).   Each release will have an embargo date, which the system will honour1. 

Presentations

These can be anything from a PowerPoint presentation to streamed video.  The latter is a specialist service and we can discuss sourcing of this type of service if necessary.

Calendar

The client can maintain the calendar on-line.  The program can be set up to automatically drop dates when they have passed.

Email subscription

We would normally have a subscription page where users can add their email address.  When news items are added, the site editor has the option to mail it out to the mailing list. 

If required the client can download the subscriber file in Excel–compatible format, which contains all users, or only the users added since the last download.

Other information

In addition the IR site will include information about shareholders, contacts, major assets and so on.