TOPS Home: TOPS Home E-Zine

Welcome back to TOPS Home, the web site e-mail magazine (e-zine) for the TOPS Community Web Site Service. This month, we are focusing on the Documents feature of your community web sites. Read all about it in our Feature Teacher and Tutorial sections. Trade show season is upon us! Learn where we'll be. Also, be sure to read about all of the new changes that have been made to your web sites in the past month. We have done a lot! And that's not all! This month's issue is so jam packed, we just know you are going to enjoy it.

As always, enjoy your reading, and if you have any questions or concerns, feel free to contact us. We look forward to speaking with you!

TOPS Web Sales: (800) 556-7852 WebSales@topssoft.com.
TOPS Web Support (800) 899-5689 WebSupport@topssoft.com.

by Andrea Drennen

Web Site Sales

Have You Told Board Members About Community Web Sites?

Association Managers, TRADESHOW season is upon us and we want to make sure that you've notified your Board Members about your ability to provide their association a web site before they seek another service provider. As their Association Management company, you'll be able to meet their web site needs in a way that no other web site service can!

Data connectivity to Account Information, CCR and even status of Work Orders are items that every resident wants, but if the Board doesn't know it's available, they'll be likely to contract for a less robust service. We encourage you to visit the Downloads area of the www.topshome.com site and download one of the flyers our expert Marketing Staff has created for inclusion with your Board Packets.

Association web sites benefit the management company by reducing phone calls to the office, streamlining work order requests, "binding" the client to your management company because of the value added by this service, and so much more. You won't want to miss out on this opportunity. Let your Board Members know TODAY about this incredible service that only you can provide.

Of course, our WebSales Staff is available at websales@topshome.com to answer any questions about the association web site service, to provide customized flyers for your Association Management Company, and to assist you as you begin this exciting new process. Call us at 1-800-556-7852 - we promise we'll take good care of you!

Susan Sanders

News Worthy

Trade Show Schedule

Speaking of trade show season! Here is a list of the upcoming trade shows that we will be attending. If you are located in the area, and would like to set up a meeting with a web sales representative, please let us know. Otherwise, feel free to drop by our booths. (TOPS Software and AtHomeNet)

Washington, DC - March 15, 2003
CAI Washington Metro Chapter Conference and Expo
Pinellas Park, FL - March 21, 2003
CAI Suncoast Chapter "CA Day" Trade Show
Rancho Mirage, CA - April 10-11, 2003
CACM CEO Managers Forum (TOPS Only)
Dallas, TX - May 1-3, 2003
CAI 52nd National Conference and Exposition

WIN A GIFT CERTIFICATE! If you're located in the area and know of a homeowner's association or property manager that would like to find out more about TOPS Community Web Sites, please let us know and we'd be glad to contact them about setting up a demo when we're in the area for the tradeshow. If they become a client, we will credit your community with one month of FREE service AND we'll send YOU a $25 gift certificate - just our way of saying THANKS!

Susan Sanders

What's New

New Features on Your Community Web Sites

Email bulletins sent from the announcements and events calendar features no longer display an http:// header if no website address is included in the item.
Added extra "add a new thread" and "add a new message" links at the top of the thread and message lists. Now when you have a long list, there's no need to scroll to the bottom.
"Invalid selection" message is now displayed if a detail page is accessed incorrectly, for example when search engine spiders crawl sites, or when one attempts to download the site from another program (i.e. Front Page)

Programming Department

Feature Teacher: Documents

Documents, The Key to Customized Info on Your Web Site

The Documents section of your web site may be one of the most useful areas for a number of reasons. You probably already know that you can post documents that people can download or view, but that's only the beginning. Today I'll go over how you can use security settings to do some interesting and useful things.

Document categories are not just for organizing the documents, they are also for setting security levels for the documents. As an example, if your residents are defined at security level 50, the web site administrator at level 1, and the board of directors at level 25, you might create a document category called "Board Only" and set its security level to 25. This way, only board members and web site administrators will be able to see that document category. Whenever you create or edit a document category, you can set the security level for it.

If you go into a particular document category with documents in it, you will also be able to edit some properties about the document. First, you can select the document category. This is useful if you need to move a document to a different category (possibly with a different security level). You can also change the document description, and even which document this link points to. Finally, if you need the display order of the documents changed, you can change its sequence in the list of documents in that category.

There are a number of different document formats you can post to your web site. Adobe Acrobat files (.pdf) and Word Document files (.doc) are some of the most common formats for written documents. Each has their own advantages and disadvantages.

Acrobat files for example, will look the same to everyone who views it. They also cannot be edited easily. This can be good or bad depending on your needs. Also, Acrobat files can be very large because it is basically graphically scanned text. For a document with many pages, an Acrobat file might be too large for most people to bother with. Also, creating Acrobat files is not a cheap task. You will need the full installation of Adobe Acrobat (not just the free viewer) in order to create the documents in .pdf format. They can be created with Acrobat Reader online, but at a per document price.
Microsoft Word documents, on the other hand, are sometimes smaller, but depending on the display settings of the person reading it, it may look different on different computers. There may also be a compatability problem, sometimes. A document created in the latest version of Word may not be viewable to someone with an older version. A plus side to Word documents, though, is that they are easy to create. Many computers come with Word already installed, and all Windows computers since 95 have Wordpad, which is a scaled-down version of Word.

These are not the only formats you can use, of course. You can use plain text files or even HTML files, both of which can be viewed by almost anyone. It's up to you to decide what format is best for your needs.

Two other nifty things that you can do with the documents feature are create "hidden" documents which you can link to manually, and create custom pages that you can add to the main menu. These items are further explained in the Tutorial section of this e-zine.

Brandon Kelley

Customer Spotlight

IMPAC Property Management

Impac Property Management, located in Manchester, NJ, provides an excellent example for this month's Customer Spotlight. IMPAC has done a great job of converting their marketing package from print to the Internet. On the site, www.impac1.com, IMPAC has added custom pages to represent the various sections of their marketing package: About Us, Our Success, Services, and Transition. These pages, combined with the standard Management Proposal Request Form, allow prospective association customers to easily perform their due diligence, and identify IMPAC as a company that they want to do business with.

Another nifty feature that IMPAC has implemented is a custom module to represent a sampling of the many communities that they manage. The Communities links lead to custom pages containing information and pictures of the communities. For those communities that use the TOPS Community Web Site service, the links navigate directly to the community web sites. Using this format to represent their communities took a little extra work to do, but by doing so, IMPAC was able to successfully portray the depth of their management portfolio to prospective associations.

To see these innovations for yourself, visit IMPAC's web site at www.impac1.com.

Andrea Drennen

Tutorial: Using Documents to Customize Your Site

In this month's feature teacher, we talked about document categories and security levels for them. With the security level of 1, we can get even more creative. First, I will show you how to add links to custom documents in existing pages, then, I will discuss how you can create a custom page from scratch:

Linking to a "Hidden" Document

Let's say you want to add a little something extra to your public home page. You would go to Feature Descriptions under the "Admin Only" area on the left menu, select the public home page, click edit, and put in any text you want. Let's say you then want to put a link to a document called "marketinginfo.pdf" at the bottom of the page. You didn't put the document into any normal document category because it didn't seem to belong there. If you put it into the Admin Only document category, however, no one but the administrator would know that it's there, and you can then link to it at will:

If you don't have it already, create a document category called Admin Only and give it a security level of 1.
This means that only the administrator will be able to see the category, but it's still possible to access the files themselves if you know what they're named.
Click Documents, and click on the new Admin Only category that you added.
At the bottom of the page, click "Edit documents in Admin Only".
Click Add, enter a descriptive name, click browse, locate and open the file on your computer, and click Save New.
The document is now stored on your website, under the documents/ folder. To see the actual location, click Documents, Admin Only, right click on the filename, and select properties. The address is the physical location of the file online. e.g. http://www.topshome.net/tops/document/marketinginfo.pdf
When you are ready to add the link to the document, enter the following into the Feature Description, and the link will point to the document you uploaded:
<a href="document/filename.pdf">Click here!</a>
Anything uploaded to a Document category or a custom module will be found in the document/ subdirectory on the web site. Since you are linking to a file already on your website, you do not need to include the whole path of the document in the link.
Once you are done editing the Feature Description, click Save Changes to complete the process. You can now view your new link by clicking the Public Home Page link on the left menu, and click on your new link to view the document.
Likewise, the same process can be done to add photos to your pages by using the Photo Gallery feature, where images are all kept in the picture/ subdirectory.

Adding a Custom Page to your Main Menu:

This feature can even be used to make a custom web page on the site! Let's say you have a document that you would like to add as a main page on your home page, such as "About Us". Follow the steps below to create a custom page:

NOTE: While it is possible to link to a regular document such as MS Word or PDF, we encourage you to use HTML if you are planning to include the page as a regular link on your menu. There are a number of programs that you can use to create HTML pages. Even MS Word will allow you to save the document as HTML. If you decide to do it yourself, there are a number of sites online that can teach you the basics of HTML. (Our favorites are HTML Goodies and About.com) Of course, we are always available to help you out as well.

If you don't have it already, create a document category called Admin Only and give it a security level of 1.
Click Documents, and click on the Admin Only category.
At the bottom of the page, click "Edit documents in Admin Only".
Click Add, enter a descriptive name, click browse, locate and open the file on your computer, and click Save New.
You should now be able to preview the page online by clicking Documents, Admin Only, and the new page (About Us).
Keep in mind, that if that page has any embedded images or background pictures, those also have to be uploaded to the site. (Simply create an "Admin Only" category in the photo gallery, and upload your images there.) Otherwise your custom page will have broken links on it. See the notes in step 4 above to learn how to find the name of the image file you want to link.
Finally, if you create one of these custom pages and want to make it look like a normal feature with a link on the left menu, just let our web support people know and we'll create the link for you!

There is enormous potential for you to customize your web site using the documents feature. Next month, I'll talk about custom modules, which follow many of the same principles as documents, but add even more flexibility.

Brandon Kelley

Support Tips

Playing the Domain Name Game

Unfortunately, it is something that happens too often, and not just to TOPS Community Web Sites, but all web sites in general. Domain name expiration (Boo! Hiss!). When a domain name expires, it can wreak all sorts of havoc. If you had TOPS register your domain, we will make sure that this does not happen. But if you already registered the domain elsewhere and brought it over to your TOPS Community Web Site, only you can renew your domain name registration. Let me first describe what can happen when a domain name is allowed to expire, then I'll go over why this happens and how to prevent this from happening:

Web browsers will not be able to see the site by going to the usual address. The web site is still there, but browsers won't know how to get to it by name. If communityname.org is the domain for the community, http://www.communityname.org/ will no longer bring up the page. Keep in mind, however, that if it is on a pointer plan and the property management company's domain is still good, then http://www.pmcompany.com/communityname/ will still work. Otherwise, a browser would have to put in the actual IP address in order to work (i.e. http://192.168.1.100/)
If there is email associated with the domain, you will not be able to check email and any email sent to an address in that domain will bounce back as undeliverable. This is one of the biggest problems with having a domain expire. If a web site is down, you can just go back at a later time. But if email goes down, you can't read or send email. This can happen when you bring a domain you have already registered to the TOPS web site.

When you register a domain name (for example communityname.org), you are telling the major domain name servers (DNS) on the Internet how to find the computer that hosts the web site. This process can take up to 72 hours to do completely. Usually, a domain is registered for 2 years time. When it expires, browsers trying to go that page will not be able to find it (even though it's still there). The most important thing to remember, though, is that if you suddenly notice the domain has expired and call the registrar company that same day, it will still take a few days for the registrar to send out the message to ALL the major DNS servers that the domain name has been renewed. Because of this, you do not want to wait until the last day to renew your domain name. I recommend renewing at least a month before your domain is set to expire.

Unfortunately, people do make mistakes. Even if you call to renew your domain name, it is still possible for things to fall through the cracks. We have already seen a few cases in which a property management company renewed their domain name with the registrar company a few months in advance, but for some reason, the registrar company didn't renew it. There is a way to find out registrar information about a particular domain:

Go to the web site http://www.netsol.com/ This is the Network Solutions (a.k.a. Verisign) web site. They are like the overall registrar and contain information about all domains.
In the upper right of the screen, click on a link that says WHOIS.
Type in the domain name and click Search.
(i.e. communityname.org, NOT http://www.communityname.org/)
This will bring up the registrar information. It will tell you the expiration date toward the bottom, as well as what the registrar company is.

If you renewed the domain but the old expiration date is still being displayed, call the registrar company immediately! It is a good idea to check on this from time to time to update any contact information about you.

Of course, the best way to prevent the domain from expiring is to be pre-emptive. As a final word of advice, here are the best ways to make sure you will be able to easily renew your domain name when the time to renew comes around:

You will receive account login information when you register the domain. File this information, because you WILL need it at some point down the road.
When you register the domain, you give it an email address to send information to. Make sure that you either always check this account or give an account that you know you will have and check 2-3 years from now. This email address will receive the renewal notices and information you need to prevent the domain from expiring.
If you make any changes to your contact information (moving addresses, changing phone numbers, changing emails) make sure to update this by logging in to your domain account. You should receive instructions on how to do this from the registrar company when you register the domain.

Keep these guidelines in mind to prevent any troublesome downtime due to an expired domain. Remember: anyone can have a web presence, but people have to know how to find you!

Brandon Kelley

Download of the Month

This month, we have created a St Patrick's Day themed flier in MS Word that you can customize, print out, and distribute to community officers at your March board meetings. This is also an excellent include in your monthly reports package. The flier is called "Luck is on Your Side" and is located in the downloads section of our web site: www.TOPSHome.com/topshome/Administrators/downloads.htm

Andrea Drennen

Did you know that TOPS Software will provide you with a free
community web site CD demo? Follow this link to apply for your free demo today!

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About the Authors

Susan Sanders is your Community Web Site Sales Representative
Matt Hardy is your TOPS Community Web Site Support Representative
Brandon Kelley is your TOPS Community Web Site Support Representative
Andrea Master-Drennen is the Director of Publishing and Standards at TOPS Software

TOPS Home E-Zine

Issue #12 - February 2003

Experience TOPS Interactive Web Sites for Yourself!