9 Design Elements every HOA Community Website Needs

With websites being one of the most effective ways to keep HOA residents informed, it’s important to make website design a priority. A well-designed website makes it easier for residents to find the community on search engines and quickly find the information they need. In this article, you’ll learn about why it’s important to have a good website design & 9 elements every HOA website needs.

Why does your community website need a good design?

1) Bring more prospective buyers/renters to the community - A good community website enables prospective residents to find your website easily and learn more about your community.

2) Increase resident satisfaction & reduce inbound calls to the office - When your community website is updated on a regular basis, residents will continue to refer to it for the latest information before calling the management office. This will save your staff so much time and improve the resident experience at the same time.

9 HOA Website Design Elements

Now that you have an understanding of how web design elements impact how your website performs and how your residents perceive the community, let’s dive into the exact elements you need!

1) Mobile responsive design

Websites with mobile-responsive design adjust text, pictures, and videos so that it fits the size of the device it’s being viewed on. A responsive web design is a must today because it improves the user experience based on the device they’re using. Search engines such as Google have switched to a mobile-first experience when ranking websites. This means that if your community website isn’t mobile-friendly, it'll likely result in a poor web viewing experience.

2) Branding

Every community website needs to include the community’s branding in its design. The community’s branding should reflect its culture, how residents perceive it, and what makes it different from other communities. You can successfully convey your community’s culture by implementing these three branding elements:

Banner

A banner image stretches horizontally across the top of your website. It’s important that the banner for your community presents a positive and professional outlook of the community. The banner should give a warm feeling to your residents when they visit your website and first see the banner. Your banner should also be authentic. Many communities use an actual image of their community. Your residents are more likely to connect with an image that is real and authentic than a stock image.

Community Logo

Your community logo is an image with text and images that reflect what your community is all about. Having a logo for your community is important because it establishes a positive connection with your residents and makes it memorable in their minds. A good community logo is simple, memorable, and identifiable.

Color Scheme

A color scheme is a combination of colors used for a website’s primary and secondary backgrounds, as well as text. Having a color scheme for your community website is important because it improves brand recognition and conveys feelings about a website.

Different colors can produce different emotions or feelings in individuals:

• -Warm colors such as red, orange, and yellow depict optimism, excitement, and happiness.
• -Cooler colors such as blue and green depict serenity and peace.  

3) Navigation

Website navigation is one of the most important elements of your website. Good navigation makes it easy for residents to find what they are looking for whereas poorly designed navigation can frustrate users. The navigation should be structured with residents in mind. How would they browse for information on a website? Where would a resident expect to find information about community activities? Where would a board member expect to find information on community budgets? Be sure to clearly title each navigation item.

Examples of navigation items that are common among many community websites include:

• -About the community
• -Contact us
• -Login (easy access to resident and board-only content)
• -Documents
• -Events
• -Amenities
• -Maintenance or other support requests

4) Page Layout/Formatting

The web page’s layout refers to how you structure your web pages and format your content within them. Overall, a good page layout will enable residents to find information quickly. When residents find information quickly, they will keep coming back to the website as they now consider it a reliable source for the latest community information. However, a poorly designed layout will frustrate residents and turn them away.

Each page on your website can have a unique layout to make it easy to find information. Examples of layouts include one-column, two-column, or three-column. For example, if your home page consists of a two-column layout, the center can include an introductory message and the sidebar can include local weather, upcoming events, or quick links.

5) Content

Having relevant and fresh content on your HOA website helps to ensure that residents can find the information they're looking for. Consider these tips:

• -What are residents contacting you about?  Group their questions into topics and write content for each topic on your HOA website.
• -Keep information short and to the point.
• -Avoid using industry jargon where possible and use vocabulary that is easy to understand.  
• -Keep the tone consistent in your writing.
• -Regularly update the content on your website.  Websites that are updated regularly with useful content are more likely to rank higher than those that do not.  

6) Photos

As we mentioned earlier, authentic and real images can establish a better connection with your residents. You can create photo galleries to display images of amenities, landscapes/buildings, and events to showcase what your community has to offer.

7) Videos

Videos are another great way to showcase your community’s culture to current and future prospective residents. Let creativity flow through in the videos you create about the community. Here are some ideas:

• -Talk about the community's goals and how managers, board members, and residents are working to achieve those goals together.
• -What residents like most about the community.
• -A tour of the community - landscaping, common areas, and amenities.
• -Tutorial videos on how to navigate through your community's website or portal to find various information. 
• -How-to videos to keep residents informed and engaged.  These topics could include home maintenance, tips to improve the value of their homes, and emergency preparedness tips.  

8) Calls to Action (CTA)

Call-To-Actions (CTA) refers to important actions that you want residents to take on your website. In general, each page should have one clear call to action to drive a certain action. That action could be submitting a contact us form, a work order request form, signing into the resident portal, or making a payment. Your call to action should:

1. -Be clearly labeled - Your residents should know what to expect when they click on the CTA.
2. -Be clickable - Your CTA can either be a button or a link.  If it's a button, make sure that the text is visible.  If the CTA is a text link, make sure to bold and underline the text.  

9) Advanced Customizations

An important part of web design is to customize the look and feel of your website. Every HOA community is different, so it should be no surprise that when creating a website, you should be able to design it in a way that reflects the community’s values. That’s where advanced customization comes in. If you have advanced HTML or CSS knowledge, you can customize background and text colors, header text and colors, button colors, and more.

Conclusion

Good HOA website design ensures that the site is easily findable on search engines and that your residents will have a positive experience in finding information. When you incorporate these design elements together, the website is easy to use and will be one that your residents become proud of!

Original article posted on Pilera.com: "9 Design Elements Every HOA Website Should Have"