How the Best Homeowners Association Websites Put HOAs Ahead

A few U.S. states already require community websites for home owners associations, especially for larger communities. If your state is on this growing list, you’ll want to make sure that you understand all the requirements you’ll need to meet so you can build a site that benefits your HOA at the same time that it takes care of your legal obligations.

But beyond checking the compliance boxes, neighborhood websites for residents make community administration easier—and if you’re a typical volunteer administrator, that’s going to save you time and enable you to build even better relationships with your neighborhoods. How about secure online payments with automatically generated invoices that go out on the schedule you specify and drop right into your community bank account with no manual intervention? Online amenity reservations and event registrations? Private, protected digital document storage with one-click downloads and customizable access rules? All these features and many more make the best HOA websites a huge advantage for their communities.

So how do the best association websites take those advantages and make them even better? Two words: Flexibility and convenience. With the right homeowners association website provider, you’re in charge of what your site does and how it does it.

Those design tools often offer templates that turn unique page creation into a matter of a few clicks and choices, without ever reducing anyone’s site to a cookie cutter clone. The templates incorporate versatile areas that accept text, graphics, or both, and make it simple to put together everything from your Home page to your Member Directory and Board roster, along with anything else you want to say, showcase, and offer on your site.

And those help resources? The best HOA website platforms know that everyone’s learning style is different. Some people like detailed step-by-step directions that cover every aspect of a feature, so you can learn your way through a process and become an expert user. Others prefer illustrated reference guides that incorporate screen captures of procedures and outcomes, along with text that narrates the basics of the process. And if you’re a visual learner who wants onscreen instruction in video format, the best HOA website platforms include those resources as well, enabling you to step through a feature and see its options play out.

If you work with an association management company that offers you access to an HOA website portal, you may think you can use it to take care of all the functions you’d otherwise create a website to handle. That’s probably not the case—and even if you decide to use property manager websites for some functions, you may not be satisfied with how they handle the full range of your online needs.

Most HOA website portals are designed to serve the management company’s needs, not yours. The company wants to set up a single website and enable multiple client communities to use it for functions such as online bill payments. The problem with that approach is that it treats each of the management company’s communities generically, with no HOA-specific content. And to serve all of the company’s properties, the HOA website portal can’t offer too many features that may not suit the lowest common denominator of these communities’ needs.

So you wind up logging in to a website that can’t provide community-specific information, beyond the bare bones of invoices and payments, and that lacks all of the community value besides its singular focus on the economic aspects of community administration.

Those are important considerations, of course, but they’re not enough to make an HOA website portal function like a true community website. By contrast, a community’s own website includes photo galleries that highlight architectural features, scenic beauty, and the neighborhood atmosphere that turns a collection of homes into a neighborhood. It shares information about community needs and developments, and even can allow residents to comment on these postings. It publicizes the special advantages of an individual HOA to attract potential residents.

For some communities, a newsfeed provides bulletins, displays one or more essential posts pinned to the top of the page, and otherwise serves as the digital equivalent of the bulletin board that every HOA clubhouse once featured. That approach avoids the prospect that people with differing views on current affairs might turn the newsfeed into a shouting match.

If you know the personalities and the people, and therefore recognize that they’re not going to misuse your newsfeed for other purposes, the best homeowners association websites give you the ability to allow your residents to post and comment. To extend the conversation even further, these outstanding HOA management website platforms even offer private chat features that rival social media platforms. Not a necessity for every community, certainly, but these features are essential to the versatility that makes home owners association websites a success.