What’s the Best Approach to HOA Website Design?
Ready to build a new home owners association website or replace your community’s current online presence? Then you’re looking for the right HOA website design resources to meet your administrative needs and enhance your relationship with community residents. That’s a specialized set of objectives, one that’s easier to fulfill if you choose equally specialized software. But not any HOA website design package can provide the right mix of thoughtful features, easy site creation, and versatile capabilities that come together to make your home owners association website a resounding success.
Before you begin looking for association website design resources, review your community’s needs and build a wish list so you’ll know the right provider when you find it. Once you’ve decided how you want your HOA website to serve your community, its residents, and the people who take care of HOA business behind the scenes, you’re ready to begin your search among HOA website platforms.
Research HOA website platforms and find the right fit
When you begin looking at HOA website examples and the website design resources that build them, you quickly find that a short list of providers shows up at the top of your search results. These providers specialize in HOAs, so they know that you want an HOA website builder that’s easy, quick, produces professional results—and showcases your unique community on its own terms.
Home owners association websites need HOA-specific features
You’re not building a website to blog about your personal thoughts, share a work portfolio, sell retail goods, provide fashion tips, or do anything else that’s unrelated to the central business of running a successful home owners association. That’s why you want a provider that offers you the HOA-specific features that you really need, not a generic blogging or shopping platform.
HOAs need a fairly comprehensive but well-focused list of targeted features to meet a set of needs that’s common to most HOAs. Among the capabilities you want, you’ll probably rank these high on your list of must haves.
- Secure online payments
- Online issuance of invoices for dues and fees
- Support for one-time charges
- Member integration and support
- Direct-to-member communications via e-mail messaging and texts
- Amenity reservations, complete with reminder messaging, scheduling constraints, and damage-fee options
- Event registrations, including ticket payments
- Photo galleries to present community life
- Member-to-member messaging through private chat
- Newsfeeds for bulletin-board functions or community conversation
- Intuitive web page builder with professionally design templates
- Extensive help resources for various learning styles
Association websites serve administrative needs
As a home owners association administrator, you don’t want residents’ architectural modification requests to turn into lengthy exchanges of email messages and confusing questions about materials and contractors. Instead, the best HOA websites build support for ARC requests directly into the sites themselves, with threaded messaging that preserves the entire conversation about a modification request in one place, including private communications among administrators. Now you can confirm with your colleagues, request changes, review documentation submissions, and approve or reject a request within a unified platform, and review the entire discussion at any time.
Of all the administrative needs and responsibilities you fulfill, assessments and invoicing probably fall high on the list of chores you don’t anticipate with eagerness. The best association websites take the drudgery out of this task, with automated invoicing, reminders, and late notices. You define the invoice parameters, and the system does all the work. With secure integrated payments, your residents receive an invoice, click on a link to reach your website, and enter their payment details without worrying about the safety of their financial information. In fact, your secure payment processor handle the payment data, none of which ever becomes part of your website.
The best HOA websites offer easy design resources
Unless you’re a professional designer with website experience, you either want a pro to guide you through the process or access to professionally designed templates that can help you create distinctive pages quickly and easily. When you look closely at HOA website design providers, you’ll discover that some of them assign a site expert to help you through the setup process, and also offer you page templates to speed up site development. That winning combination can cut your site development time down to size.
At HOA Start, we want to offer you an optimized HOA website design experience from the moment you demo our software throughout the site-creation process and on into support for your mature, growing website. Take advantage of our deep experience supporting the best association websites, and build your community’s online presence with a modern platform that can grow along with you.
