06 Support Department

Letters to TOPS

Q.I am looking into the options for establishing a web presence for our homeowners association that will provide the means for our 1832 homeowners to have a link to us electronically online. Besides the standard documents that I would like stored such as by-laws, deed restrictions, policies, etc... I would like to be able to provide online access to monthly newsletter, minutes of meetings, etc...

How would this content get into the site? would that be a process that I may perform or does that need to be handled by your team? Can additional categories be added on the fly? or is that something that we would need to rely on your assistance to handle.

Would I be able to handle advertising content as well? This would be a good benefit for our newsletter advertisers to be able to also place [an ad] on our site, but not if it requires a lot of attention, costs, and interaction with your staff.

We are currently using TOPS in our office, but if we choose to move away from this would the web site be dependant on that information to continue? Your feedback on these questions will be helpful in determining my next steps.

A.These are all excellent questions that cut right to the heart of our community web sites, so I will go directly to the answers:

Using the documents feature, you can put by-laws, deed restrictions, policies, newsletters, and meeting minutes. In fact, you can put any file that you can save onto your computer on a TOPS Community Web Site.

Data is loaded onto your site in two ways. The owner data such as address, balance, last payment, CC&R violations, ACC Requests, and Work Order status are uploaded from TOPS. All you have to do is set a schedule, and TOPS will upload new data automatically. Information that is unique to the web site such as documents, events, and advertising is uploaded via the Internet. These dynamic pages can be managed from any computer connected to the Internet, via a secure login. You may add as many categories as you like, and manage the contents of those categories.

Not only can you add your own advertisements in the classified ads section, you may also purchase the option to add banner advertising to any page on the site. Each TOPS web site comes complete with a vendor database where you can track advertisers. You can even set an expiration date, and the advertisement will disappear at that date.

Of course, we would like to see you using TOPS for many years to come, but if you should choose to go with another product, you would not lose your website. Any data that comes from TOPS (financial data, for example) would be unavailable, but the primary features of the site itself would remain.

Feel free to check out our interactive demo at www.topswebsites.com for more information.

Andrea Drennen is the Internet Services Manager for TOPS Software.

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