TOPS Home E-Zine; Issue #37 - June 2005

Welcome to TOPS Home, the web site e-mail magazine (e-zine) for the TOPS Community Web Site Service.

In this issue:

SALES DEPARTMENT: Is It Time For An Overhaul?
WHAT'S NEW: What's New in Your Community Web Sites
UPCOMING EVENTS: Live Chat "Promoting Your Web Site"
JUST FOR FUN: Not Sure How to Keep the Kids Entertained All Summer?
NEWS AND NOTES: Online Payments and the Association Management Industry
PRODUCT REVIEW: SwishPix for custom Photo Slide Shows
SUPPORT TIPS: 8 Tips for Taking Community Photos
CONTACT: Contact Information for TOPS Software

NOTE: TOPS Software will be closed on Monday, July 4th in observance of the Independence Day holiday.

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

SALES DEPARTMENT

Is It Time For An Overhaul?

As busy as most folks are today when they get on their computers they want to accomplish something online. They're not aimlessly surfing the Web in hopes of finding some incredible cyber-nugget. Instead, the average Net user is interested in finding information of some kind. Whether it's keeping up with current events, making purchases or communicating with others - they are typically purpose driven, intent on accomplishing something they set out to do.

Ask yourself the following questions:

What is the immediate, short-term goal of your web site?
What are your specific objectives for the long term?
Who do you want to visit your site?
What specific action do you want visitors to take?
What solutions or benefits can you offer to these visitors?
What data should your site provide to achieve your primary goal?
What information can you provide to encourage them to return to your site?
What questions do you get asked the most on the telephone?
What data should your site provide to achieve your secondary goal?
How often do you want visitors to return to your web site?
Do you know what visitors think, can they ask questions and make comments?
Who is your competition?
Does your competition have a web site?
Did you know there are many ways in which a web site can pay for itself and even be a source of revenue?

How does your web site measure up? Allow our Web Sales Department to assist you with the answer to these questions.

A TOPS Interactive Web Site Can:

Provide prospective buyers with their first impression of your community, and may even influence their decision to visit.
Be an excellent forum for communications between you, community officers, and residents.
Act as a tool for Community Officers to gauge community opinions through online surveys and forms.
Foster a real sense of community and increase participation in community activities such as board meetings with the events calendar.
Fully integrate with TOPS 2000™ so you and your clients can take advantage of many time saving business processes such as Online Payments, Online AP Approval, 12-month owner histories, and much more!
Be advertiser supported, generate advertising revenue through selling classified ads to local vendors. This advertising can offset most or all the costs associated with maintaining the web site.

The uses and benefits are as endless as the imagination. What other feature or service benefits everyone involved, from management to community officers to home-owners and residents?

To learn more about TOPS Interactive Web Sites go to www.topshome.com or Contact TOPS Web Sales at (800) 556-7852 or websales@topssoft.com.

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WHAT'S NEW

Updates to your TOPS web site(s) This Month

Added Classifieds and Reviews to the internal Search Engine, so web site visitors may now search for items in these features. Like all search engine components, security levels are preserved, so visitors that are not logged in to your web site may only find items that are set to view security level 100, Owners and Residents may only view results for items set to security level 50, etc.
On the back end, we have implemented a brand new SQL server which is responsible for handling page requests from web site visitors. The new server is faster, has more memory, more hard disk space, more processors...more, More, MORE! This upgrade will provide greater speed and reliability to all of our customers' web sites across the board.
If you have any questions about how these enhancements work please contact TOPS Web Support at WebSupport@topssoft.com or (800) 899-5689.

UPCOMING EVENTS

Next Live Chat - Promoting Your Web Site

We had another great chat this month! It was an 'Open Forum', and the questions ran the gamut from the TOPS Home Ezine to Flash and JavaScript to the New ASP.NET version of the Web Site Service, and more! This was a great chance to talk about what is coming up in the TOPS Community Web Site Service, and TOPS 2000™. The transcript is posted on the Administrator Forum under Documents.

Our next chat will be held on Thursday, July 7th at 2pm EST. We will be discussing 'Promoting Your Web Site'. This is an excellent opportunity for you to hear from other administrators how they promote their web sites, and share your own promotion tactics. Let us know what works for you, and what doesn't, and let us share ideas to help your site promotion be even more successful.

Additionally, TOPS Web Support will be available to answer your questions about META Tags, Search Engine Submissions, Search Engine Optimization, and online advertising. Please let us know that you will be attending so we know how many people to expect. You can email your RSVP to websupport@topssoft.com, or submit it on the site at www.topshome.com/admin. You must have a login name and password to access the site and attend the chat, so be sure to visit the web site and request your login info today.

We are regularly adding new information to the Administrators Forum, so be sure to check out the Web Site Features section, or the Message Board to talk with other administrators. This is a private site for TOPS Community Web Site administrators only, so if you wish to check it out, you will need to request a login. Sign up today at www.topshome.com/admin.

JUST FOR FUN

Not Sure How to Keep the Kids Entertained All Summer?

Don't panic! Check out www.RegalCinemas.com and click on the "Free Family Film Festival". Selected Regal Theaters around the country will be running G and PG rated family films for nine weeks this summer at 10am each Tuesday and Wednesday. It's for kids and their parents and the best part is - it's absolutely free! Just click on your state in the drop down box for the location nearest you - entertain the kids and get out of the heat!

Check out these other web sites for summer fun ideas for the kids:

Find the closest National Park to you by searching the National Park Service web site at www.nps.gov or www.us-national-parks.net. You can do a geographical search for park near you or also search for a park by topic - from boating to dinosaurs to the Civil War. It's also a great site for education for the older kids; featuring park history and culture, as well as conservation.
Want to ship the kids off? Check out www.summercamps.com for daytime-only, overnight, and also sports camps for kids. Everything from computer to equestrian; acting, skiing and even 'swim with the dolphins' camp!
Library sources online as well as a directory of public and specialty libraries worldwide can be found at www.libraryspot.com.
Events and Attractions - a nationwide list of water parks, zoos, aquariums, museums and children's museums by state can be found on www.raisinnet.com/water.htm.

Feel free to use this article on your community web site. If you have some great ideas for web site content that you'd like to share, please drop us a line at insider@topssoft.com

NEWS & NOTES

Online Payments and the Association management industry

The association management business is unique in that it is essentially small government that acts as a business. Because community associations are considered a business in the eyes of the law, business regulations still apply. This presents a unique problem when dealing with credit card processing, since there is no one person or persons that are responsible for the association. The Board of Directors are elected posts that are limited in duration, so board members do not wish to put up their own social security number to open a merchant account, or to accept responsibility for charge backs on credit card transactions. Similarly, the management company is a service provider with a terminable contract, and thus does not wish to take on liability for the association either.

Through eRentPayer, management companies are able to activate online credit card processing for the associations they manage with limited liability, and no required personal guarantees. This benefit allows communities' members to pay their dues online without the need of personal guarantees, difficult set up processes, charge-back liability, or minimum monthly transaction amount requirements on the part of association representatives. However, this level of service comes with a price. Since eRentPayer is taking on the accountability for each association or management account that is set up with them, transaction times and fees must be adjusted to accommodate this undertaking.

If you use online payments through TOPS Software and eRentPayer, you may have noticed a delay of 5-7 business days between the time an owner pays their dues online and the time the funds are made available in your bank account. This delay is due to the additional process through which an owner payment must go. When an owner makes a payment to their association, the monies are transferred first to eRentPayer's account, where it is held until the transaction is completed from the owner's bank account. This takes approximately two to three business days. Once this transaction is completed, a second transfer is initiated from eRentPayer's account to the association's account, which takes another two to three business days.

This procedure has been set up to save our customers from the hassles of setting up individualized accounts. However, if you wish to take on these hassles in exchange for reduced transaction times, you may choose to set up an individualized merchant account for your management company or association(s). Contact eRentPayer at (866) 289-5977 for more information on the necessary requirements. Before making the decision to take this step, be sure to consult your lawyer to determine if this will conflict with any of the governing laws for your association(s).

Product Review

SwishPix for custom Photo Slide Shows

TOPS Software gives you a great lead out of the starting gate with your community web sites by providing you with a well-designed, easy to use, highly interactive community web site. However, many of our web site administrators want more! Most specifically you ask for movement. Slide shows of community photos, custom animated splash pages, and module driven flash navigation are three of the most commonly requested customizations. While TOPS does provide this service, we do have to extend the added costs of the Flash designer on to the customer, for each individualized animation she creates. This can be both expensive and time consuming, for both you and TOPS.

Unfortunately, learning a massive program like Flash can be a daunting prospect. The good news is, there is a product available that is both cheap and easy to use. It is called SwishPix, and it allows you to create a simple Flash animated slide show in just a few minutes. You can simply select your photos, apply a theme, add music, callouts or clip art and you'll have an animated photo album that can be loaded onto your web site.

SwishPix only costs $29.95 (compared to $499 for Flash). You can purchase it online at www.swishzone.com. This site also includes a 15-day trial that you can download to see if the program is right for you, and a number of samples to show what the program is capable of.

SwishPix does include a publish to the web option, but the HTML it outputs needs to be modified somewhat to work on your TOPS web site. If you choose to create slide shows with this product, simply send us the resulting package (containing the .swf and .htm files) to websupport@topssoft.com and let us know on which page you would like the program to be displayed. We will modify the code for you and get your animation up and running on your site.

Should you choose to use SwishPix to generate automated online content, I warn you to use it sparingly. Adding animated content to every site you own can significantly bloat the amount of space your web sites take up, and thus put a strain on the server. Remember that you are entitled to 80MB of server disk space for your entire portfolio. This includes uploaded data from TOPS, so be sure that if you do create animated or flashy content for your web site, that you use common sense. For example, a 40 picture slide show is TOO MUCH. Reduce the number of pictures to 5-10 good ones; both TOPS and your web site visitors will thank you!

SUPPORT TIPS

8 Tips for taking pictures of your communities

Here are eight tips to help you spice up your community photos, particularly if you are planning to post them to your community web site, or print them in a brochure:

Take your pictures midday to avoid shadows, or take them in the early afternoon to get good sky shots with interesting shadows in strategic places. It is also better to take the pictures in a season that shows off your community to advantage, for example, spring, when the flowers are blooming.
Variety is the key. Don't take every image exactly the same. Try different zooms, angles, directions, lighting, etc.
Try to portray a sense of scale across multiple pictures. For example don't take an entire series of your condo buildings with every single image peering up at the buildings. If all of the pictures are taken at exactly the same angle and position, there is no sense of scale for the viewer, and they cannot appreciate the majesty of the buildings, or the beauty of the gardens.
Use perspective to indicate motion. If you are taking a picture of a building, don't stand directly in front of it and take the picture. Instead, stand to one side or on the street corner so that the viewer's eye is lead through the picture as if they were walking up to the building.
Include people in your images. A community feels like a community because of the attitude of the people in it. This does not mean that you should display images of a board meeting on the front page of your web site, but if you have a pool, take a picture of kids in the pool, or better yet, zoom in to a kid's arm splashing, or legs kicking in the water, or the giant smile on their face. Use this same technique with all of your amenities. Showing smiling happy residents in the setting of your community indicates to web site visitors that you have a true community where people can form friendships and be happy together.
When taking pictures of people, don't stage your images, or if you do, don't have people look at the camera. A smiling family where every person is looking at the camera looks staged. Better to have them smiling at each other, or looking slightly down or to the side, so the image looks like a private moment caught on film. This also neatly avoids red-eye.
Allow the viewer to use his or her imagination. It is not necessary to get the entire clubhouse or swimming pool into a shot. If the image is cut off, the person looking at the picture will use their imagination to fill in the details.
Take a LOT of pictures. If you only take three pictures and two of them are bad, you are stuck with only one useable image. The law of averages indicates that the more photos you take, the more likely you are to wind up with some really good ones that you will be proud to display.

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!

CONTACTS

Here is a list of some of the most common contact data for TOPS Software:

Department	Contact	Email	Phone
Software Sales	Nicole Sezov	sales@topssoft.com	800-760-9966
Web Site Sales	Susan Sanders	websales@topshome.com	800-556-7852
Technical Support	Jeanne Plennert	support@topssoft.com	800-899-5689
Web Site Support	Brandon Kelley	websupport@topssoft.com	800-899-5689
Accounting	Cande Estrella	billing@topssoft.com	301-869-8144

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TOPS Home E-Zine; Issue #37 - June 2005

Experience TOPS Interactive Web Sites for Yourself!