Make your homeowners association website a true team effort
You don’t need to be a web programmer to set up an attractive, full-featured homeowners association website, but you also don’t need to go it alone. Turn the process of setting up a world-class HOA site into a team venture that you can share with others who want to be involved in helping your community thrive. A well designed, optimally set up HOA website offers you the ability to divide up the administrative work among multiple people. Before you choose a homeowners association website software provider, make sure that they offer these features and this level of collaboration.
Share the administrative work
Unless you really have the time to take on all of the administrative tasks for a busy community single handed, you want to share the work with others. In an ideal configuration, homeowners association website software enables you to have as many administrators as you need, and to give each one of them unique login credentials that enable them to be involved in keeping the site up to date. How you divide the tasks is up to you, based on the interests, available time, and comfort level of everyone who wants to be involved. In fact, when residents sign up for membership on your website, what if you could use a customized form to ask them about their interest in website administration and invite interested parties to participate?
Count on expert assistance if and when you need it
No one should have to set up a website without expert assistance. That doesn’t mean that you aren’t savvy, or that you don’t have a clear vision of what you want to accomplish with your community’s online presence. It simply means that everyone deserves readily accessible technical support to ensure that they always know what to do and how to do it. Ideally, online support is easy to access from any setup page of the administrative dashboard of your website, and yields a quick, on-target expert response every time you use it. At its best, this type of assistance also is context sensitive, so that when you click on a help link on a dashboard page, the help you receive relates directly to the feature with which you’re working.
And different personalities want different kinds of help. Some people want a written description of a feature that includes a detailed description of each step, and the consequences of making specific choices within the setup process for that feature. Others want videos that show on-screen displays of what to expect, and step-by-step guidance that shows you exactly what happens as you work your way through a process. That’s why you should look for a help system that includes both written, step-by-step descriptions of features and videos that walk you through specific aspects of site administration.
Engage your entire community in conversation
What’s one of the first things people value about a neighborhood in which they enjoy living? Communication: with people next door, with people on the next block, with people who share their interests. And what’s one of the best ways to get to know your neighbors? Not everyone is comfortable knocking on doors and saying hello. Once you enroll all the residents of your community in your homeowners association website, you should be able to offer them a secure, private communication medium they can use directly through the website, without having to resort to social media channels, e-mail, or phone calls.
In fact, you probably want two types of communication channels on your homeowners association website: one that’s more nearly public, so you can use it like a bulletin board to make announcements and engage with your community at large, and another that allows members to communicate one on one in private discussions. If the website software providers you’ve been using or considering don’t offer features such as these, maybe you’re building your HOA website in the wrong place and on the wrong platform.
Make it easy to take advantage of your community’s important features
Two of the most important advantages of a vibrant, attractive community are its amenities and its events. You want your residents to be able to take full advantage of these elements of community membership. But if your homeowners association website doesn’t make it easy for residents to sign up for events or reserve the use of your amenities, then your site is shortchanging your community on some aspects of convenience that they have every right to expect.
Just about everyone expects to be able to do these sorts of things online, and to receive immediate feedback that their reservations are successful and their online payments have gone through. For that matter, you want an easy-to-use payment system that accepts secure payments and doesn’t require a PhD to set up. If your site can’t truly facilitate these types of processes, you need a better alternative, one that’s centered around understanding the functionality you need and making it easy to achieve.
At HOAStart, we consider these features to be necessities, not niceties
If the homeowners association website software provider you use doesn’t offer you these features, take a look at HOAStart. In fact, you can take more than a look: You can take advantage of our 30-day free trial. Try out our software without even being asked for payment information. Customize your site and experience what we have to offer for a full month. Engage other members of your community as site administrators and dive in together.
We think you’ll very quickly find that we offer you all the features—and all the convenience—that you really want. Why are we so confident that our website software offers the performance you deserve? Because we have years of experience with homeowners association websites: How they work, what they need to do, how they should make it possible to share the administrative work and receive top-notch support. We’ve built all that experience—and all those features—into our HOAStart websites. See what we can do for your community, and get started for free.
