Set Up Your HOA Website to Showcase Your Unique Community
Whether you’re setting up a homeowners association website to meet legal requirements in your state or because you want the advantages that a site can offer your community and its residents, you want to highlight the unique features of your neighborhoods and help new residents feel right at home. To do that, you need to customize site appearance and functionality through adjusting design parameters behind the scenes.
Some HOA website software providers give you limited control over these appearance parameters, however, and that can leave you with a cookie-cutter site that resembles all the other sites built on the same platform. That kind of undistinguished presentation can’t give you the distinctive look you need to convey your community’s unique attributes and neighborhood spirit. To put your best foot forward, you need a modern, easy-to-customize design platform that makes it simple to give your site a pleasingly professional look.
Easy page setup
If you’re not a web design expert and you don’t want to spend the money to hire one, you may find it dauntingly difficult to take on the task of building a homeowners association website from the ground up using one of the popular content management systems, or CMSes, that power sites for blogs and businesses. These CMSes include multiple layers and levels of functionality designed to accommodate all the complex features that advanced websites require. Many of these options may exceed what your community really needs, but you still need to wade through them to complete the task of site setup.
Wouldn’t it be easier to start with a platform that understands the features that make up a robust homeowners association website and provides exactly the options you really want to use? At HOStart, we have years of experience in building specialized platforms to support homeowners association websites and guiding communities through the process of creating exactly the online presence they need. We’ve built our website software to offer those desirable features, and our support functions provide all the insights you need to make full use of them, including direct assistance, a library of tutorial videos, and a complete help system with step-by-step instructions for every feature and function.
Professional design guidance
If you set up your HOA website through a conventional CMS designed for regular blogs and sites, you either need to make a long list of aesthetic decisions or hire a professional to guide the look of your online property. Otherwise, you face the real likelihood that you’ll be unhappy with the site you build and may need to start over, losing valuable time and—if you wind up having to retain a professional designer to assist you after all—spending money you hadn’t budgeted for the project.
If you start with a robust, customized platform design specifically for homeowners association websites, however, you can take advantage of professionally designed templates that set up the basics of site design and leave the fine details for you to customize as you see fit. Unfortunately, many HOA website software providers don’t offer these kinds of templates, or the ones they do offer look dated and include only limited customization. To save you and other homeowners association administrators from these limitations, we’ve put together a broad range of professionally designed templates for HOAStart customers that help you quickly and easily achieve the look you want.
Easy page design
Conventional CMSes include long lists of page feature options and customization choices, but they also force you to rely on third-party software for many essential functions. For example, you can’t simply add a member gallery or newsfeed. Instead, you’re forced to research, review, and select from a long list of add-on software, all of which promises to offer you great results, regardless of whether it actually does. Some plug-ins offer limited features, or save their most desired features for paid premium versions that you must pay to re-license every year. Other plug-ins contain bugs that cause inconsistent performance. While you experiment with the types of options you want, you can spend a considerable amount of time without achieving the functionality you want, and when you finish the process, you may be left wondering whether you’ve made the best choices possible.
On a dedicated software platform designed specifically for homeowners associations, however, you should expect to find a wide range of well-crafted templates, each specifically created to make it easy to add a particular type of page content to your website. These templates should include hints to help you make the most of each feature, and easy ways to designate content as publicly accessible or limited to members only. At HOAStart, we’ve put this customization ease at the top of our site-building list of features, with straightforward page templates for all the types of content you’ll want to add.
Simple menu structure
On a conventional website, you can invest a lot of time setting up a website menu so it includes exactly what you want to present. Obviously, a regular CMS needs to include this kind of flexibility to accommodate the customers who typically use this sort of software. But homeowners associations have relatively predictable needs, and the do-whatever-you-want flexibility of a regular CMS may be complete overkill for them.
At HOAStart, we’ve made it incredibly simple to create and structure your website menu exactly the way you want it, and to update it easily as your site needs change. Structure main menu and submenu items, edit page names, drag and drop these items to reorganize them quickly, and delete pages you no longer need. Our software interface makes it simple to accomplish these tasks in minutes, without feeling as if you should sign up to take a class just to learn how to set up your website.
Build your community’s website today
Want to see how your community’s homeowners association website will look on the HOAStart software platform? We offer a 30-day free trial so you can test drive our software, set up your site, share it with your organization leadership and your residents, and see for yourself why we’re certain that we offer exactly what you need.
