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 have a number of great articles to help you improve your use of your existing web sites, and more. Susan Sanders talks about how community web sites can solve a common "Solicitation" problem that most communities have. Andrea Drennen presents 5 tips to make Board members happy, and Brandon Kelley talks about ways to improve navigation in your community legal documents.

Additionally, we unveil a new feature on our www.topshome.com web site, and tell you about an upcoming web site development conference that we will be having. We are also very excited to be able to present an excellent customer spotlight this month, written by Sharon Baron, the web administrator for www.imaginationfarms.org.

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.

Andrea Drennen

Web Site Sales

Stop Wasting Time and Money!

Every minute without the Community Web Site service being used by each of your associations is a minute of wasted precious volunteer and staff time and expense. We have heard a Board Member or two make the comment that $50 a month for a web site is too high. We think they're right, $50 for a static web site is too high, but not too much to pay for an amazing integrated service that allows residents to have access to their account balances, status of work orders, 12-month history on their accounts, the ability to receive email updates from their association on late breaking news such as pool closings or snow removal. Not too much to pay for increasing residents awareness of topics important to association living, not too much to pay for increasing the communications in the neighborhood, not too much to pay for residents to have access to reliable vendors recommended by their neighbors. The features that come standard in the association web site service are almost overwhelming, and all this for just $50 per month.

We encourage Managers to work with their Boards to compare the costs of the association web site service for the whole year ($600) to the cost of a year's landscaping of the common areas, a year's worth of pool maintenance, a year's worth of newsletter printing. The value is truly in the web site service.

If pricing still discourages a Board, remind them that with a little effort, the site can actually be a revenue source for the association. Similar to hard copy newsletters, associations are able to sell advertising to local vendors. We have seen associations post menus, coupons, discount certificates that residents can then print out and use as if it was taped to their mailboxes. We all have those signs at the front of our entrances "No Soliciting" but it never seems to discourage some vendors. These are the companies your associations should be calling and selling them the ad space. Vendors love it, as their ad is available for the whole time frame, not just the one day they put the flyer on the mailbox. Residents are happy because they know where the coupons are when they need them, and Board Members love it because no one is calling them complaining about flyers blowing through the neighborhood. A Win-Win-Win for everyone involved.

To help you educate your boards on the feature set available and functionality built right in to the service, we've got some great marketing materials available for you to download at www.topshome.com/topshome/Administrators/downloads.htm - just scroll down to the Board Handouts area. Or give us a call at 1-800-556-7852 and we can customize them for you. We also have the ability to BRAND the Community Web Site demo as a service of your management company, so if you're interested in receiving these, just give us a jingle!

Susan Sanders

Download of the Month

Changing The Login Background Graphic

Have you ever wanted to change the brick wall graphic that appears in the background of your login screen? If so, the new tool we have added to our web site is for you! The tool is a background selection program that allows you to choose from hundreds of tileable background colors, images, and textures, and preview them to see what they would look like on the login screen. Then, simply fill in the form to submit your newly selected background image to TOPS Software's support team. To try out this feature, go to www.topshome.com, click the Administrators tab, click Email Forms, and then select the "Change Login Background Graphic Form".

Andrea Drennen

News Worthy

WANTED: Your Feedback!

TOPS Software is always working hard to make our TOPS Community Web Site Service the best anywhere. To better achieve that result, we have been holding semi-yearly conferences to review the features we have added to the web site service, what developments we intend to add, and to set a development schedule. The next TOPS Web Site Development conference will be held at the end of June. So now is the time to submit any changes, new features, or ideas that you have for the service. Please submit any suggestions you have to websupport@topssoft.com.

Andrea Drennen

What's New

New Features on Your Community Web Sites

The following new features were implemented within the last month on all TOPS Community Web Sites:

Service Requests now upload to the Work Order portion of "Account Info".*
Service Requests may now be included/excluded from an individual community upload in the "Upload Options" screen in TOPS 2000™.*
Owner History Notes may now be included in the 12-month history upload.*
The name parsing AI routine has been upgraded again to make TOPS 2000™ even smarter when determining primary/secondary (spouse) owner names.*
"Run Community Web Utility at Startup " menu option has been renamed to "Run Internet Scheduler at Startup" in TOPS 2000™.*
Address book now allows searching on email address in addition to first and last name.
Enabled Garage Sales to show up in "What's New" feature.
Replaced underlying technology to make the hit logging and Statistics reporting features faster and more reliable.
Administrators may now delete people from the Address Book directly from the person detail page.
The email bulletin feature within the Calendar edit screen now only appears if the poster has the security clearance to send email bulletins.
Resolved issue of quotes in Announcements being converted if an eMail Bulletin was sent at the same time.

* Starred items require running of the "Check for New Web Files" option in TOPS 2000™ in order to receive these updates.

Programming Department

Feature Teacher

Rethinking your Property Management Web Site

Most management companies with TOPS web sites concentrate their energies primarily on the community web site and its functionality to their clients. Their management web site is used primarily as an advertisement and a way to provide forms to clients, but is rarely used as an internal communication tool for the company. We would like to encourage management companies to consider using your management web site as a more extensive tool for communication within the company. To see an example of some ideas you could put forward towards a management web site, see our new TOPS property management demo at http://www.topshome.com/pm/. At first the only noticeable difference is the Associate Login link, but that's the key to it. This serves as a login for employees of your company.

Using this private side of the management company web site, you can share useful company documents and forms, as well as allow employees to submit eForms for company business. Since this is a web site, there is no special network setup or configuration necessary to access these resources, and employees can even access documents while on site at a community or at home if they cannot get to the office.

Employees can also view company announcements, event calendars, coverage and training information. Using the Live Chat feature (not listed in the demo, but we can put it in if desired), you can hold company-wide meetings in a real-time chat environment that can be accessed from anywhere, as long as you have a valid login name and password. eForms can be used to submit IT problem reports, time-off requests, requisitions and HR requests.

The possibilities are endless. Anything that a community web site can do, a management web site can do as well. The one difference of note is that employee login information will have to be entered manually, as opposed to having TOPS 2000(tm) simply generate them automatically. But property management companies rarely have hundreds of employees, so creating and managing 10-50 employee logins is much more reasonable than 100-3000 resident logins.

If you are interested in setting up your management web site to have more employee functionality as described in this module or on the demo, send an e-mail to websupport@topssoft.com with a description of what it is you're looking to do with your site, and we can get you started in enhancing your management web site from a nice advertisement to a fully functional employee communication tool.

Brandon Kelley

Customer Spotlight

Imagination Farms

Imagination Farms is a residential community of 415 homes in Davie, Florida which is outside of Ft Lauderdale and Miami Florida. It is a relatively new community with homes that range in price from the $400s to the $700s with owners seeing their properties values increase quickly as available land for new developments in Broward County dries up.

We received our new TOPS Community Web Site back in 2001. All residents were mailed their passwords and login information but rarely did anyone ever logon. We had a resident Web site Administrator that, unfortunately, did not have the time to customize our web site on a resident level for 2 years. Hardly anyone knew Imagination Farms even had a web site.

Fast forward to March of 2003 when our Homeowners Association VP Steve Parra noticed this lack of interest and appointed me to run the web site. I'm a stay-at-home-mom who had a very little experience with HTML and running a web site. But he knew how much I love computers, photography and just being involved with the community. I've also been a fan of the "World Wide Web" for over 10 years and had my own family web site. But a computer programmer, I definitely was not.

Mike Grosso at Century Management Services trained me in one morning how to use the TOPS site. It seemed like it was just a matter of customizing the modules to give it a personal touch. I went home and immediately went to work. One of the things that really helped me was the unlimited support I received from TOPS. They gave me advice on HTML tags, storing pictures on the site and customizing my modules to suit my community. I also have a great support resource in Nan Xander from the Arrowhead Lake community in the Poconos. I saw her site featured in the March issue of the TOPS Home e-zine, contacted her, and received some great ideas and tips for our site.

The TOPS web site interface is very easy to use. I try to encourage all my residents to sign up for Email Bulletins which sends out updates right from the site to all the subscribers, and Eforms which is the best way for our residents to communicate with Century Management Services. With the help of TOPS Web Support, I've customized the site to include a lot of new modules, including: a "Yard of the Month" contest, a "Most logged on Resident" contest, "Baby-sitting listings", "Carpools", "Items for Sale" and a "Lost and Found" area.

Since I started with the site in March, I've seen our login rates go up from 30% to 55%. It's been great seeing how busy our message boards are with neighbors sharing ideas and opinions with other neighbors. But most of all, it's been great hearing positive feedback about the site from our residents.

Sharon has graciously provided a demo account to allow our readers to preview the private side of the Imagination Farms site. You can check out the private area of www.imaginationfarms.org using the login name: TEMP, and password: GUEST. Remember that this is a live web site, so please be courteous during your visit!

Sharon Baron, Webmaster
www.imaginationfarms.org

Tutorial

Enhancing documents With a linkable table of contents

This month's tutorial deals with adding certain HTML code to your documents to make them more accessible to viewers. The objective here is to add a table of contents at the beginning of a document that points to certain areas within the document. See this sample document for an example of this table of contents. Using links within your documents can make board documents and bylaws much easier to navigate. For example, in the sample terms of service document, you can create a table of contents that has the following links:

Acceptance of Terms
Member account, password and security
Member conduct
etc..

Each of these links points to the corresponding section within the document, making it easier to navigate the document.

Before we begin, there are certain criteria that have to be met in order to perform this lesson:

The document must be in HTML format. If the document is in Microsoft Word format and you have MS Word 97 or later, you can convert it to HTML using Save As..
You must have a copy of the document file on your computer. We'll be editing the file on your local computer, so if you don't have a copy of the file, download it from the web site.

To perform this task, we will be working with the HTML anchor tag, or <a>. By adding an HREF attribute (Hyperlink Reference) to the anchor tag, you can create a link to a web site address. For example, the following code will create a link to the TOPS Home web site:

In an HTML document, the above code would appear as TOPS Home, but clicking on the link will open a browser window to the address set in the HREF attribute. There is also a way to set the link to a particular section of the document. The following code will point the link to a section of a page that is labeled "TOP":

<a href="http://www.topssoft.com/index.htm#TOP">TOPS Software</a>

Notice the #TOP. This tells the web browser to look for a section of the document named TOP. So how do we define the section? Actually, we use the anchor tag again, but in a different way. It's one versatile little tag, isn't it?

<a name="Top">This is the top of the document.</a>

Notice the name attribute? That tells the web page what the name of this section is. If this name tag were located in the index.htm document we were linking to earlier, the link to #TOP would point directly to this area of the document and it would show up at the top of the web browser. Although I put text between the beginning and end tag for named anchor, this is not necessary. In some browsers, it makes the text look like a link, even though it's not. Therefore, it may be preferable to have the text outside of the tag, like this:

<a name="TOP"></a>This is the top of the document.

A link to this section of the document would work exactly the same way. The only noticeable difference is how it appears on the page. Finally, there is a way to abbreviate the link if it's located within the same document. Let's start out by showing the full address of the document we're using as an example:

http://www.topshome.net/pm/documents/tos.htm

Now, let's say that we want to point to a section in the terms of service document called LINKS. Instead of the following code,
<a href="http://www.topshome.net/pm/document/tos.htm#LINKS">
we can abbreviate the link to <a href="#LINKS"> because it's in the same document. The web browser will automatically assume, since no other address was given, that the link points to the current document, ToS.htm.

I hope this helps you make your community documents more user-friendly! Good luck, and remember that you can always contact web support at websupport@topssoft.com if you have any questions or need help implementing this into your web site.

Brandon Kelley

Support Tips

5 Quick Tips to please board members

The fastest way to successfully implement a community web site is to impress the board members. If you can make your board members happy, and get them using the site on a regular basis, the web site will quickly become integrated into your entire community. There are a number of features on TOPS Community Web Sites that are specifically targeted at board members. Try these five tips to put smiles on your board members faces:

Upload financial reports from TOPS 2000™ to the web site.
Board members will have access to the data at any time of the day or night, and the added bonus of fewer printouts to keep track of. Full instructions on how to do this are available in the Knowledge Base at www.topshome.com.
Track Site Statistics.
The Statistics menu under "Admin Only" provides a great way to provide board members with monthly information on the site. You can generate reports on how many times each page is visited, who has logged in, how many times, and when, and so much more!
Create a Board Only Documents Category.
Create a documents category (or more than one!) with a view/edit security setting of 25. This category is only visible to board members. They can share documents that are on review, or upload documents for editing purposes. Since the edit level is set to 25, each board member will be able to upload and download documents from this category. (If you would like to add a link to the category under the "Board Only" heading, simply let us know at websupport@topssoft.com)
Use the Surveys Function.
Board members often need residents' opinions before voting on proposals. The surveys feature is restricted to one response per homeowner, and you may set a cut off date for the survey. This is a much better solution than a written petition or door-to-door survey.
Allow board members 'View' access to owners account information.
How convenient if board members could see the last 12 months of activity on a homeowner's account simply by clicking a link! Simply let us know that you would like to change the security level of this feature by sending an email to websupport@topssoft.com.

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 #15 - May 2003

Experience TOPS Interactive Web Sites for Yourself!