3 Ways to Make Your Homeowners Association Website Easy to Set Up

You probably already know that many homeowners associations are setting up websites, either because they need a site to comply with state law or because they want one to serve as an administrative, communications, and marketing tool that eases HOA tasks while it presents the advantages of living in their communities. If you’re planning to set up an HOA website but haven’t done so yet or aren’t fully pleased with the provider you’ve selected, think about three ways that you can make this important task easier and more successful.

1.      Built to do what you need to accomplish

You may think the ideal starting point for a homeowners association website is a blank canvas. You want to customize the site so it tells the story of your neighborhood spirit, community features and amenities, and all the reasons that residents want to live there. But if you start out with a truly blank canvas, now you’re responsible for every aspect of site design and set up—or you’ll have to pay an expert to do it for you.

If you’re a web designer in your professional life, this may not sound like much of a challenge, but for most people, sitting down in front of a new, blank website in a constant management system such as WordPress can be a truly intimidating experience.

Choices abound, and what happens when you make specific selections may not seem completely obvious, at least not without some expertise, experience, or research. By the time you figure out how to do what you want to do, your fellow homeowners association administrators may be asking you when you’ll finish the site. (In other words, “Are we there yet?”)

Instead of that wide-ranging set of choices and the potentially extensive research involved in figuring out exactly how to respond to them, why not start off with a professionally designed website design software application through which you can create exactly the site you want without having to worry about these behind-the-scenes details? When you build your HOA website with HOAStart, you get all the advantages of years of professional experience working with homeowners association to build exactly the types of sites they need.

2.      Intuitive setup screens

Many HOA website software providers claim to offer setup processes that are easy and intuitive to follow, but sometimes, you discover that that promise isn’t quite fulfilled. Once again, just as with the start-from-scratch approach, you’re faced with entry field after entry field in which you’re supposed to type your data, but you’re not really sure what goes where and you don’t get a lot of assistance along the way. Other site-building applications may make the task easier to approach, at the expense of creating dated results that look like a time machine brought back the earlier days of the internet.

You probably don’t want a website that looks like a blog from 2008. However, depending on the HOA website software provider you choose, you may be stuck with exactly that. Many of these site building applications use software that hasn’t been updated in a long time—and that cannot be updated without a great deal of rebuilding and effort. If you work with these providers, you’re stuck in the bygone days, or at least your HOA website looks as if you are. And some homeowners association website software seems extra difficult to use because even if its input fields are labeled clearly, it lacks much of a help system or any form of tutorial support.

At HOAStart, you don’t have to deal with these hassles. That’s because we’ve made certain that every one of our site-building screens makes sense, and that you can tell exactly what to do at every step. We’ve labeled every input field with a tool tip that tells you what it does. Roll your pointing device cursor onto one of these tooltip icons, and the description appears right next to your cursor.

Along with clearly labeled functions and easy-to-understand input fields, we offer you a complete help system, as well as step-by-step training videos that cover essential features. In addition, our online help system gives you the ability to ask specific questions and receive quick answers from our tech team. We’re always here to help, and we start out by building site-construction software that’s easy to use and understand—with full support at every turn.

3.      Easy design steps

Once you set up the basic information about your homeowners association on the back end of an HOA website software application, you may be left scratching your head as to how to translate that into the visual representation you want your residents – and the public – to see. Faced with lots of little palettes of unlabeled icons, or a bunch of checkboxes that don’t offer obvious connections to design decisions, you’re back to trying to figure out what to do next.

At HOAStart, we make it easy to achieve professional looking results for your homeowners association website. First, every site begins with one of our professionally designed themes, which offer you coordinated sets of color choices you can choose with a single menu selection. Once you select a theme, you can begin creating your site with easy-to-use page templates for the principal types of functions that virtually every HOA website needs to perform for its community. You’ll find templates for member directories, image galleries, events, amenities, and so much more. Arrange your site with drag-and-drop ease, preview it at any time, and when you’re ready to go live, simply save and load your site design.

Get ahead of your HOA website needs—and create the site you really want

At HOAStart, we offer years of experience in dealing with the needs of homeowners associations and the websites they need to uncomplicate their administrative tasks while they convey their advantages. We can help you simplify the task of creating a fully functional website that combines attractive design with the features you need the most. Take advantage of our no-strings free 30-day trial to see how HOAStart can help you make your dream website come to life.