TOPS Home E-Zine
Issue #13 - March 2003
March 2003: Inside TOPS Home
1)
Welcome to TOPS Home!
2)
Thrill your Board Members
3)
New Tri-fold Brochure
4)
More Help for Web Site Admins
5)
New Features Added in March
6)
Live Chat
7)
Arrowhead Lake Cmty Assn
8)
Security Levels
9)
No, Not A Timeout!
Welcome back to TOPS Home, the web site e-mail magazine (e-zine) for the TOPS Community Web Site Service.This month's e-zine is bigger and better than ever! We have been very busy in the last month, as this issue will show. We have updated all of the help materials that are available to you online, and added 10 new features to your community web sites. Be sure to read about all of the new changes!
We are very pleased this month to present an outstanding community web site that we can all learn from. Read more about the Arrowhead Lake community in our community spotlight. Our Feature Teacher for the month is an article about the Live Chat feature, the Tutorial article for the month is a thourough discussion of the security levels of your community web sites, and the Support Tips article discusses time out errors, and how to prevent them. Finally, and perhaps most exciting, is our newest download, a very attractive and professional tri-fold brochure that you can customize to your management company and then distribute to prospective and current community customers.
NOTE: You may have noticed a new file uploading when you perform your updates from TOPS 2000™. This file, ACC1YR.WEB, is the preparation file for a new feature we will be rolling out soon: 12 month account history for each owner. The feature is currently in the testing phase, but we expect to activate it within the next month. Stay Tuned!
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.When was the last time your board members were thrilled?
Over the past three months we've been to tradeshows from Coast to Coast and we're getting the same feedback. Board Members are absolutely thrilled when they hear that their own association web site can tie directly into their Association's Management Company software giving residents access to their own account information, work order status, CCR and ACC requests and so much more. Only through a TOPS Association Web Site can this functionality be found so we encourage you to use this unique feature to set your management company apart from others in your area. Use this to your advantage, when making presentations highlight this capability - you'll see some amazing responses!
Our Publications Team has created some great marketing materials for you to use as you highlight this unique aspect of your management company. There are flyers to include in Board Packets and even custom CDs for you to hand out! If you're interested, email us at websales@topssoft.com and we'll get them in the mail to you today!
New Tri-fold Brochure!
This month, we have created a tri-fold brochure in MS Publisher that you can customize, print out, and distribute in your marketing packets and to community officers at board meetings. The brochure is called "The Future Is Now" and is located in the downloads section of our web site:
www.TOPSHome.com/topshome/Administrators/downloads.htmMore Help For Web Site Administrators
We have been working a lot recently on the help materials for our community web site customers. All of the new and updated items are available at our website, www.topshome.com:
- We have added two new sections to the Administrators area of our www.topshome.com website. The new areas are Help, which contains all of the help documentation that we have compiled, and Eforms, which contains several online forms that you can complete to contact support, make changes to your account, or order customized demo CDs.
- Our user manual has been completely redesigned and updated to reflect all of the new features on your community web sites. A version of the manual is available for download from our website. Click Administrators and Help. If you prefer, a new welcome packet can be mailed to you. Simply email your request to websupport@topshome.com.
- Over 100 new topics have been added to our online knowledge base. The knowledge base has also been re-categorized by web site feature to allow easier navigation of available help topics. Click Administrators and Support Knowledge Base.
Of course, the web support team is always available at websupport@topssoft.com. Feel free to email us with any questions you may have.
New Features on Your Community Web Sites
We have recently implemented some exciting and useful new functionality to your web sites. Please see the list below for details. We encourage you to provide us with feedback on any changes we make, or any ideas you might have for future changes. Email us at websupport@topssoft.com
- For administrator view only we have added the "Last Login" and "Login Count" info to the bottom of each resident's Address Book "profile" page. This allows administrators to quickly see when the last time a particular user logged into the site (if at all), and how many times they have logged in total. This info will not show up for any other than Admin Security Level 1.
- Added the "User Profile Edit" page as an option under "Feature Descriptions" so administrators can now add custom wording to the top of the User Profile Edit page.
- Added "Time Out" warning in Message Board and made the Message edit area bigger.
- Added wording on Events Calendar "add" screen to remind people that "End Date" is only to be used for events that span multiple days.
- Enabled a "Send to All" option when sending an eMail Bulletin while adding a new Announcement
- Events Calendar now posts the name of the person who added each event to the bottom of the Event Detail screen. The name is a link to the user's address book entry.
- Resolved "apostrophe" problem in eForms.
- Resolved bad cookie issue if resident "Saved Login Information" and then changed login or password on User Profile screen.
- Removed any leading or trailing spaces on new Logins and Passwords typed in by residents or administrators to avoid login problems
- Added some additional data validation to various data entry screens to insure correct data entry.
Live Chat
One of the most unique and dynamic features of TOPS Community Web Sites is the Live Chat feature. This feature allows anyone who is currently signed on to the web site to take part in a real-time community chat. The chat window updates itself any time the user presses Enter, clicks Send, and automatically every 7 seconds. This allows any additional messages added to the chat to appear almost instantaneously. What's more, the chat transcript is left alive for several hours, even if idle. So if everyone who was in the chat suddenly had to close their web browser and then reopen the web site, their conversation would still appear.
As an administrator, you can greatly influence how residents use the web site by choosing where information on a particular topic will be put. If you post an announcement that there will be an open forum on Live Chat at 7pm regarding ideas for new parking rules, people will use the feature. If you post an announcement (with accompanying email bulletin) that the first of each month at 8pm there is a new-homeowner Q&A in the chat room that anyone is welcome to take part in, both for learning new things and for sharing information and advice, many people will drop in (if for no other reason than to get to know the new homeowners). Assign certain time slots to different committees to have open forums for their topics. Schedule chats with your vendors (especially if they are doing some work in the community), your golf pro, property manager, or other "experts" in the community. There are so many possibilities available for the Live Chat feature!
Using the Live Chat feature is easy. When the page first loads, there will already be a blinking cursor in the text message area below. This is where you type any message you want to enter into the chat. By pressing the Enter key or clicking the Send button, your message posts to the Chat transcript, which displays above. To clear out the text in the chat transcript, simply type in "/clear" (without the quotes) and press Enter to clear out the current transcript. Keep in mind that anyone in the chat can send out a /clear command, so you may not want to tell all residents about this feature.
The Live Chat is one of the simplest and easiest features to use, yet the hardest part about it is to get people to use it. The best way to encourage its use is to schedule certain times for round-table forums and brain-storming sessions. These sessions are far more rapid than message board forums and can accomplish a great deal in a shorter amount of time.
Do you have a story of how you influenced your residents to use a particular TOPS web site feature? Let us know by e-mailing us at websupport@topssoft.com!
Arrowhead Lake Community Association
Arrowhead Lake Community Association is a large self-managed community association located in the Pocono Mountains in Pennsylvania. The community is a very active and close knit one, with scores of events for homeowners to participate in each month. The community's website, www.arrowheadca.org, is an ideal place for residents to keep track of all of the community events, documents, and photographs that are generated.
Recently, Nan Xander took over as webmaster for their community website. In little more than a month, she has turned the community website from an occasional resource to an integral part of the community. So much so that their average page views for the last month have shot up to 864 per day! Nan has done such a great job at maintaining and marketing the website that we asked her to give some of her pointers to our other customers. Here is what she had to say:
"My goal was to make the site more informative, interactive, and more easily navigated. I've received several compliments on how the web site has improved...and that's always nice to hear.
I'd like to say that your support team is wonderful - they explain everything in very simple terms and the response time for replies is great. Also, your software is very easy to learn and use, which made my new job a lot easier. :-)
As for comments on our web site to other customers....I've found that if you enhance your web site with graphics, sounds, etc., make use of the pop-up window for Urgent Announcements and such, along with creating several ebulletins of various interests, etc. you will find that users will visit your web site more frequently. I've also been able to get more residents to use the web site by the use of flyers announcing the url and what features are available on the web site."
Nan has graciously agreed to allow our readers to view the private side of the Arrowhead Lake web site. To do so, go to www.arrowheadca.org, click resident login, and enter the login name "tops" and password "alca". This resident level access will only be available for a limited time, so be sure to check out the site today!
Overview of security levels on your community web sites
Almost every TOPS community web site is unique, but as the administrator you may choose to have certain features unavailable or available only to certain security levels. These security levels are what sometimes make each web site have different features from one another. Although you can find out what an individual feature's security level is, it is sometimes difficult to get a good overall view of your web site and the features available to each security level. In this month's support tutorial, we want to show administrators a few ways of getting an overall feeling for the web site they administrate.
Before we begin, it is important to point out something. Because many administrators choose to make certain features unavailable or available only to customized security levels, the following descriptions may not describe your web site exactly. For details on your particular web site's security levels for each feature, login as administrator, click on Statistics Menu on the left, then click Show Security Settings. This table will show you who can add, edit and delete which features on your site. It does not, however, show you the view only security levels.
Public side: what everyone can see
The following features are usually viewable on the public side of the site to everyone. They are available here as VIEW OR SUBMIT ONLY:
- Public Homepage
- Resident Login
- Classifieds
- eForms
- Facilities
- Garage Sales
- Homes for Lease
- Homes for Sale
- Homesites (lots) for Sale
- Map
- A link to the property
management company.The various classifieds and "for sale/lease" areas are available to let visitors interested in the community an opportunity to see what is available from this community. The eForms are available in case someone needs to submit a login request form, or contact the community leaders.
Private side resident: what the owners can ADD/EDIT/DELETE
The features available for residents to view, add, edit, and delete are:
- User Profile
- Garage Sales
- Homes for Sale
- Home for Lease
- Live Chat
- Message Board
- Reviews
- Kids Play Groups (custom module)
- Recipes (custom module)
Please notice that residents can only add, edit, and delete items from this list that they originally posted. For example, they cannot delete another resident's garage sale item or message board posting. The exception to this is the Live Chat feature, where anyone can use the /clear command.
Private side resident: what the owners can VIEW OR SUBMIT ONLY
The following features are usually viewable on the private side of the site to residents.
- Account Info
- What's New (though they can set how many days to see what's new)
- Address Book (some sites choose NOT to have residents view this)
- Announcements
- Board/Committee listing
- Documents
- eForms
- eMail Bulletins
- Events Calendar
- Facilities
- Hot Links
- Requests/Questions
- Surveys (although they can vote on
a survey).Private side Board Only: what the Board Member see
Board members usually have the same access as residents, except that they can also view:
- Board Only Reports
- Board Only Message (can post)
- Board Only Chat (can post)
- Board Only Documents (can post)
The Board only documents is an optional feature that can be set up by the administrator. Simply create a new document category and define it as view/edit security level 25. If you wish to add a seperate link under the Board Only heading, please contact websupport@topssoft.com.
Private side Admin Only: what the Administrators see
Next, we have the options available to administrators. Administrators can view, add, edit, or delete any content on the site with a few exceptions. These exceptions are:
- Changing anything on the left menu frame
- Changing the footer of each page (i.e. This web site is a service of ...)
- Changing the background graphics or colors
- Changing the security levels of an entire feature (i.e. all of Documents or the Address Book)
To make any of these changes, the web site administrator should contact websupport@topssoft.com describing the request in detail, and we will take care of it for you.
Hopefully, this overview will give you a better feeling for what is available to whom on your community web sites. If I failed to mention something in this article, it is probably because it is something an administrator CAN do. For more information on how to perform specific tasks as an administrator, please see our Knowledge Base at www.topshome.com under Administrators for in-depth articles on using different features of the web site.
"NO, not a time out!"
Many people remember the dreaded "time out" punishment that was imposed when we got in trouble with our parents as kids. Well, it is equally painful to get a "time out" on your web site, and those who have received an error message similar to the one below know exactly what I'm talking about.
"Script timed out, the maximum amount of time for a script to execute was exceeded"
This error message almost always occurs when you are loading a document or image using the administration features of the site. The message indicates that the loading of that document or image was taking longer to complete than the web site server was willing to wait, which is 3 minutes. Below are some general guidelines that you can follow to avoid getting this error and to make your web site easy and pleasurable for your residents to visit:
- Load time is directly related to the size of the document or image being loaded, which is represented in "k" or "kilobytes" of storage space on the computer. A reasonably sized picture should be not more than 100k to 200k in size, and ideally, less than that (a 50k image takes approximately 20 seconds on a 28.8kbps modem). Unfortunately, with the popularity of high resolution (or "mega pixel") digital cameras these days, many digital pictures can come out of the camera at more than 1000k in size by default. The good news is that virtually all digital cameras today either have a way to reduce this image size directly built into the camera itself, or come with software for your computer that will allow you to resize the images once they are saved to your computer. A typical web image should be set to a resolution of 72-150 ppi (pixels per inch) be no wider than 400 pixels (to avoid the need to scroll back and forth), and be saved in a compatible web format, such as GIF or JPG.
- Like images, documents also have a "kb" size indicating the amount of space they take up on the disk, and some formats of documents can become very large due to the extra formatting information that is stored in them by the software that creates them, even if they are only a few pages long in print. For example, most "desktop publishing" documents, such as Microsoft Publisher contain a large amount of formatting information so that a fairly small document can easily be 1mb or more in size. As is the case in images, the smaller the size of the document, the quicker it will load to the web site for you, and the quicker it will download and be viewable for your residents. Often, documents can be converted to formats that require much less storage size, such as HTML or PDF, and this can be a great way to reduce your document size before loading it the the web site. It also has the benefit of allowing your document to be viewed by virtually anybody using a browser, even if they don't have your desktop publishing program or word processor on their computer. Once again, for ease of downloading, please try to keep document sizes in the 100k to 200k size if possible. Documents that are much bigger than this will be time consuming to download from the site for your residents, particularly those with slower internet connections.....leading us to the 3rd guideline.
- Remember that not all residents connect to the Internet at the same speed. Although some lucky people are connecting with DSL, ISDN, Cable or Satellite connections, which vary between 128kbps (kilobits per second) to 2000kbps, most are still connecting using modems that can vary from 14.4kbps to 56kbps, which means they can take up to 70 TIMES LONGER to download pictures and document than the fastest broadband connections. Because of this, administrators with very fast connections must take care not to load documents and pictures (even though they can) that are too large for their modem connected residents to be able to download in a reasonable timeframe. After all, the purpose is to provide information to residents in a quick, easy to use manner, and waiting 45 minutes to download the latest community newsletter or meeting minutes will cause nothing but aggravation.
We all eventually outgrew (hopefully) the "time outs" of our youth and similarly, this modern day equivalent can generally be avoided by following these simple guidelines when adding documents and images to your web site.
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
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websales@topshome.com
1-800-556-7852
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Please contact TOPS Software at info@topssoft.com,
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