Customizing The FastTrak Platform

The FastTrak platform is built for customization – enabling your school or brand to truly own your own custom site, complete with your own colors, branding, and messaging.

The Home Page

The home page can be endlessly customized to perfectly match your brand.

Our designers generally start by matching your existing site’s look and feel – using your existing colors and messaging, with a stock market theme. This is done either by taking advantage of your style guide, or direct impressions from your existing sites.

We can also branch out and add any extra content, messaging, icons, colors, sliders, or links that you think can best represent what you want the site to be, whether it is a dedicated resource for a trading room, customer acquisition tool, educational resource, university-wide trading challenge, or high school learning tool.

Click below to see some sample home pages

Ithaca College, Medgar Evers, Horizons ETFs, Finamex Casa de Bolsa, Howard University, Indiana Council for Economic Education
Estimated Turnaround Time For Changes: Mock: 2 days, Live Site: 1 week

Interior Page Templates

We generally build the site based on your existing logos, colors, and styling, but we understand these change over time. If you have updated your university or organization’s website and branding, just let us know and we will be happy to re-skin the site to match your new look and feel.
Estimated Turnaround Time For Changes: Mock: 1 week, Live Site: 2 weeks

The Header

The header has two customizable components – the logo bar, and the main menu. The header is uniform between all pages on the site.
Estimated Turnaround Time For Changes: Mock: 2 days, Live Site: 1 week

Logo Bar

Your logo and tag line appear at the top. This space has a minimum width of 1025 pixels, and can either be one uniform image, or a 728 pixel ad unit alongside a 200 pixel logo.

Estimated Turnaround Time For Changes: 1 week

The Main Menu

The main menu is the primary navigation of the site. The default layout is based on user feedback we have received from all of our clients, but it can be customized to your needs.

The Default Menu is above, but items can be added or removed based on your needs. We can also add your social media buttons to the menu.

For an example of a custom main menu, check out IndianaSMS, which has custom Donate and Volunteer buttons.
Estimated Turnaround Time For Changes: 1 week

Left Hand Links

To the left of this page you will see a list of links. This list is fully customizable – you can include as many external resources, internal resources, or extra pages as you like. For examples of some Left Hand Panel configurations, check out these clients:

• High School Investing – lots of custom educational content
• Howard University – Quick start guides for students with external resources
• Horizons ETFs – Corporate Promotional Material
• Virtual-Stock-Exchange – Help guides for all users

Estimated Turnaround Time For Changes: 1 week

Right Hand Content

On the right hand side of all pages is a 300 pixel wide bar, which we call the “Right Hand Panel”. The contents of this box are completely customizable. The most common “widgets” to include are:

• Assignments you have created for your students
• Announcements you make to your students or clients
• Facebook and Twitter feeds
• Commodities and Indicies watchlist
• Customizable stocks and ETFs watchlist
• Live Market News
• Top 10 of the week and of all time rankings
• Pie Chart showing portfolio breakdown
• Word of the Day with common glossary terms
• Quote of the Day from famous investors
• 300 pixel wide ad units
• Your own images and links

The Right Hand Panel is different on various pages – this allows you to keep a dynamic feel to your platform by offering different content and widgets on different “templates”. The templates are:

1. Dashboard page
2. Trading pages
3. Portfolio Pages
4. About Pages
5. Videos Page
6. Administration Pages

We generally recommend keeping the Announcements and Assignments on each page (these only appear if you have an active announcement or assignment), and including 2 or 3 other widgets, different on each page.
Estimated Turnaround Time For Changes: 1 week

The Announcements Box

You can add messaging to all of your users on the fly with the “Announcements Box”. This is a right hand panel widget, and currently accepts text only (no images or formatting).

The announcements box can be changed at any time from the on-site administration tools.
Estimated Turnaround Time For Changes: Instant

The Hello Bar

The “Hello Bar” appears at the top of all pages (except the home page), if you have one active. Unlike the announcements box, you can include any formatting, links, and even images (if they are small) that you like in the Hello Bar. Unlike the announcements box, this cannot be changed “on the fly”, but just email our team during business hours to get your messaging added (usually within an hour).
Estimated Turnaround Time For Changes: 1 Hour

The Log In Overlay

You can also add a pop-up box to give your users reminders when logging in. The overlay box accepts any images, HTML, or embedded content that you like.

The overlay, like the hellobar, can only be added to our team, and will be up within an hour if you send us a request during business hours.

The overlay only appears when a user first logs in, and when closed will not appear for 1 week (unless the user clicks “Remind Me Later”).
Estimated Turnaround Time For Changes: 1 Hour

Standard Content Pages

There are several content pages that are part of every site. You can provide your own content for any of these, our we will provide our own defaults from a template. These pages can be customized, removed entirely, or set to redirect to your own pages:

• Rules
• FAQ
• Prizes
• About

Estimated Turnaround Time For Changes: 1 Week

Custom Content Pages

Do you want to include an extra page with information about volunteering? How about recruitment specific to your business program? No problem!

Just send our team a Word document with the content you want to include (and any images you want to add), and we can add it in, plus links to the Home Page, Main Menu, Left Hand Panel, or anywhere else you want to feature it.

All custom content pages look just like this one – preserving your left-hand list of links, but without the right-hand widgets.
Estimated Turnaround Time For Changes: 1 day (page live), 1 week (links added directing to the new page)

Custom Educational Content

You may have already read about our Assignments Feature – these are integrated learning modules that are built-in to the site. These generally consist of an article or calculator followed by a quiz, a video your users need to watch, or certain trades and orders they need to place.

Categories include:

• Video tutorials showing how to use the site
• Articles covering stock market basics and what each security type is
• Personal finance articles
• Economics articles
• The 10-Chapter Investing101 Course
• Making basic stock, ETF, and mutual fund trades
• Making international stock trades
• Trading options
• Trading other security types

You can also include your own articles or content! You can require your students to read a scholarly article, or fill out a questionaire, and include this as part of your assignment on-site. The educational content at HighSchoolInvesting is all custom content unique to their program, but fully integrated in their assignments as part of the custom platform.
Estimated Turnaround Time For Changes: 1 Week

Custom Registration Fields

Every site needs different information from people when they register. Add or remove fields you ask each person when they create their account.

By default, we need a username, password, and email address, but you can include as many more fields as you like.

If you are working with teachers, we can even set up the registration to have teachers generate all the accounts for their students (great for organizations where FERPA compliance is a must)!

Other Customizations

Other customization is also available. The scope and timing will differ significantly depending on the request, so if you want to see something else, just ask!

Some other customization projects we have done in the past:

• Single Sign On with your own site or Facebook
• Custom stock lists (only allow your users to trade certain securities)
• Custom exchanges – extra fees may apply depending on the exchange you are looking for (we already include over 50 global exchanges by default)
• New Languages – We are currently translated in English, Spanish, French, Mandarin, Greek, Hungarian, and Polish. Extra languages are added at no charge for custom sites, but we will need you to provide the translations (a list of terms will be provided).
• Allow any user to create their own challenge and invite their friends – great for client acquisition initiatives
• Entry and Exit Surveys
• Custom Rankings – Adding different rank groups based on age, geographic location, or any other metric captured at registration