You're not the only one looking for information about your HOA
Think about it a minute...what better tool does your community have other than its website to showcase itself to those looking to buy homes in the association?
Sure, an HOA website definitely serves the needs of the homeowners who are paying for the upkeep by providing updates on News and Events, easy access to Architectural documents and Covenants, but let's widen your focus for a minute to think about two other very important groups your website could serve: potential home buyers and realtors. While homeowners are the focus of content serving the HOA, others, outside the association are looking at the website for glimpses of data that may swing their decision in favor of buying a home in that community.
Features such as News, Events, Announcements, Documents, and forms to submit online are invaluable to homeowners who actively participate in their community and interested in staying engaged, but guess what - potential buyers are evaluating your community based on the all of these same topics homeowners use to remain connected. Genius!
Potential home buyers may base their decision between buying in your community or another, based on whether or not there are activities for their children, ease-of-access in getting information to understand how to replace a fence, etc., and realtors are also looking at your digital presence to research great communities to present to their clients.
Your website is a reflection of you and your community to those who may not have even visited. Think of your website as the "curb-appeal" folks look for when driving by in cyber-space.
Content and information on an HOA website has to be easily found
Period! End of sentence! News and Events pertaining to the HOA have to be easy to understand and available to read and the variety of documents needed, which serve HOA members needs to be organized and maintained in such a way that even a novice can find them. Simply put - we know what works best to accommodate the wide-variety of skills homeowners have, which serves those who are very tech-savvy and those who are somewhat tech-challenged. The many years of experience we bring to an HOA, allows us to key off this expertise and design and build a website that serves these skills.
We have a website, but no one is taking care of it
In our many years of providing service to HOA's, we've seen a lot of things, including what happens when an HOA has a website that a well-meaning homeowner put up, homeowners became reliant upon, and then the content stopped getting updated. Whether that well-meaning homeowner moved away, or became disenfranchised with the HOA because of a letter about weeds, content is not being updated, meeting minutes stop getting added, and the website stops getting used. This is not a good sign of a healthy association, but can be easily corrected.