TOPS Home: TOPS Home E-Zine

Welcome back to TOPS Home, the web site e-mail magazine (e-zine) for the TOPS Interactive Web Site Service. The holidays are upon us, and we have compiled a veritable feast of information this month!

First, Cyndi Sanders explains how email bulletins can be used to reduce phone calls from residents. Next, we have a new board handout for you to customize, print out, and hand out to board members. It is all about using a web site to build healthy connections within a community. In newsworthy we'll tell you all about a new change that is going to make life easier for those of you using the CC&R and Work Order modules, along with some great tips on the TOPS Internet Updater.

We have a new batch of changes that have been made to your community web sites under What's New. Several of the changes this month are based on feedback that we have gotten from you - keep it coming!

In the Feature Teacher, Brandon talks about using the Garage Sales feature. Feel free to copy and paste the article to use in your own newsletter or email bulletin. In this month's tutorial, Brandon dispels the myth of the two tiered reviews section - a must read if your community uses the reviews feature.

Our community in the spotlight this month is HOAMCO's Mystic Hills, in beautiful Sedona, Arizona. Finally, I share my favorite free image resources online - a surefire way to dress up your site for the holidays!

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

Reduce Phone Calls With Email Bulletins

Have you checked out all the great features available through the TOPS Interactive Web Site Service recently? There are so many advantages to having TOPS Interactive Web Sites for all your clients, we wanted to take a couple of lines and let you know all the ways that using the eMail Bulletin feature has helped free other community managers from spending countless hours on the phone answering questions or sending out written correspondence; often relaying the same information over and over again.

Alleviate these tedious phone calls to the manager! Once your communities are online with their own interactive association web sites you can use eMail Bulletins to quickly get the word out to the residents and board members of all your associations. When residents realize that a neighbor is being notified of important information electronically, WOW! the resident participation soars!

Popular uses for email bulletins:

Reminder that the latest account balances, payment history, work order status, etc. are all available online!
Notification of changes to Garbage Pickup Schedules
Snow plowing/School closing news
Pool Opening and Closing Info
Annual Meeting Reminders
Reminders of Assessment due dates

The list really can go on and on. Think about the reasons people call their property manager, and what questions they are asking. It is very likely that more than one person has that very question and soon they'll be calling. Take a minute and use your TOPS Interactive Web Site to send out an email bulletin on that topic - your phone really can stop ringing!

For more information on eMail Bulletins, or to experience TOPS Interactive Web Sites for yourself, please call Cyndi or Susan at 1-800-556-7852, or visit our live online demo at www.topshome.com.

Cyndi Sanders

Download of the Month

Healthy Connections

This month, we have created a flier in MS Word that you can customize, print out, and distribute to community officers at board meetings. The flier is called "Strengthen Connections In Your Community". It is geared to board members, and discusses ways to foster a healthy community by strengthening the connections between community members with a community web site. The flier is located at: www.TOPSHome.com/topshome/Administrators/downloads.htm

To customize the handout, simply download and save the MS Word document, find and replace the words 'Your Management Company" with your company's name, and VIOLA! Instant marketing materials to hand out at this month's round of board meetings.

Andrea Drennen

News Worthy

New Handling For "Rebuild TOPS MDB"

For some time we have discouraged you from using the "Rebuild Owner Access Data" utility since this function caused login names and passwords to re-set in TOPS. While this did not cause problems with preexisting logins, new owners and resales could result in duplicate login names on the web site. Our programmers have been hard at work to find a solution to this problem.

The newest version of the TOPS2000.EXE, available from the Internet Updater, will solve this problem once and for all by generating a backup file of existing login names, passwords, and email addresses every time you rebuild the owner access data. In English, this means that from now on you can rebuild your TOPS.MDB files as often as you need, without nasty ramifications to your web site.

Tips For Updating Successfully Every Time

The TOPS Internet Updater is one of the most important tools in your arsenal, as it insures that all of your TOPS files are as up to data as our own. As such, you should run the Updater manually at least once per month (Even if you have the auto check for updates option turned on) to keep current. Here are a few tips to make sure that your updates run smoothly every time:

While you can run the updater from within TOPS, it is a good idea to run it separate from TOPS so that none of the files you are trying to update are running at the time. To run the updater online, close TOPS on your machine, go to www.topssoft.com, click Downloads, and click the "GO" button under Internet Updater. When the box pops up and asks you to open from the current location or save, click Open.
You will be presented with two options at the bottom of the updater window: Update Workstation files only, or workstation and server. You should always update the workstation files only, and later update the server as a workstation. If you choose to update both simultaneously, you will need to kick all other users out of TOPS, or the server update cannot successfully complete.
To make sure your files are completely up to date, you should always complete both the TOPS 2000™ update and the Community Web Sites update under "Module to Update", since each targets a different set of files.

Andrea Drennen

What's New

New Features on Your Community Web Sites

This month, we're proud to announce an important enhancement to the Events Calendar. Many times, your community has events or meetings to schedule that reoccur on a regular basis such as board and committee meetings, book club gatherings, jazzercise classes, and other team and social events. You've always been able to schedule these events to show up in the calendar on a reoccurring basis, but if something changes and you need to update the calendar, each entry in the series had to be edited individually, which could take a while! Now if you need to change the category, time of the event, or description for a reoccurring event, you can click on Edit this event and choose to change every occurrence of that event at the same time! Please note that this applies only to events added to the calendar after November 1st and not to those reoccurring events that are already posted. Also, if there's a situation where you need to change the day on which every event in the series occurs, you can now easily delete the entire series of events as a group, and just start over with a new entry.

We've also tweaked the email bulletin feature to solve some issues you brought to our attention. Some clients told us they had a problem sending email bulletins to AOL email addresses; others encountered difficulties with using the WYSIWYG Text Editor within the email bulletin feature. These issues have been resolved now, as well as an error that caused some email bulletins to not show a "from" address when sent out to the residents.

You also let us know that in a few instances, residents whose security levels were set so that they would be prohibited from posting messages on the message board were able to reply to other resident's postings. We've made adjustments so that this is no longer the case.

Programming Department

Feature Teacher

Garage Sales

This article applies to administrators and residents alike! If your residents have the ability to add their own garage sales (check Show security settings under the Statistics Menu to find out) you can share this article with them! Feel free to copy and paste the below article into an email bulletin, Community Newsletter, or online document.

I would like to take this opportunity to cover a very useful feature on our web site that residents can utilize to their benefit: the "Garage Sales" feature. This feature allows residents to post notices on the web site of upcoming garage/carport/yard sales to inform other residents of this event. Any resident with access to the web site has access to post their own garage sales.

Adding a garage sale is easy! Simply log in to the site using your own unique login name and password, click the Garage Sales link on the left menu bar, and click "Add, Edit, Delete Garage Sale" at the bottom of the page. When the garage sale listing appears, click the new button at the bottom left to add a new sale.

When you choose to add or edit an upcoming sale, there are a few fields you can choose to fill out. All of the fields are optional, although if a date is not filled in, it will default to the current date. In addition to the dates, you can also specify the timeframe and location of the sale. Finally, the Items field is where you can add a description of the garage sale or list any items you plan to sell.

The Garage Sale feature also allows an expiration date. The end date indicates the last day that the sale should be posted on the web site. If the end date is prior to the current date, the item will be deleted from the web site. This works automatically in real-time, so if the expiration date on a sale is 12/1/2003, on 12/2/2003 at 12:00 a.m. the sale will be deleted. This expiration feature helps the administrator by relieving them of the work of deleting older items. There are other features - such as Classified Ads and Announcements - that utilize this feature as well.

Feel free to enter as much as possible about your garage sale. You can add pictures, format the text, use bulleted lists, all of these features are available in the WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) text editor. The better your garage sale listing looks and describes the items you have, the less questions you will have to answer regarding those items.

The Garage Sale need not be limited to only garage sales, either. You could also post information about a home show for a product display, a tupperware party or a candle show. The Garage Sales feature can be an online forum for buying and trading items lying around the house. So what are you waiting for? I'm sure you could use a little extra money...

Brandon Kelley

Is there a feature that you would like to learn more about? Send an email to websupport@topssoft.com with your suggestions for our next Feature Teacher.

Customer Spotlight

Mystic Hills Homeowners Association, Sedona Arizona

Our Homeowners' Association had been wrestling with the problem of a web site for our Association for several months. The Association was turned over from the developer effective January 1, 2002 (the 'transition' date). The only web site for the Association was a web site that the developer had created for the sole purpose of selling homesites in Mystic Hills. As there were still several remaining homesites for sale, the developer wanted to retain control of this site. While there are a total of 138 homesites in the Mystic Hills development, we only have 32 homes built as of September 30, 2003. Of those 32, only about 12 of us live here on a year-round basis. The rest of our Association Members are scattered all over the United States. It makes communication very difficult at best. You can imagine what it's like trying to get a quorum for anything requiring a vote of the Members.

After the 'transition' date, the new Board wanted to let everyone know exactly what they were doing now that the development was out of the hands of the developer. We sent quarterly letters, newsletters, etc. in an effort to start on an ongoing dialogue with the members. It quickly became apparent, however, that this was both time consuming and expensive. So we began to discuss how we might use the resources of the internet. We made several attempts to get all of our Members' e-mail addresses, and probably have 75-80% now.

We registered several Mystic Hills domain names and finally settled on 'MysticHills.org' for the actual web site address. We then started talking to some local web designers to build a web site for us. Well, this turned out to be a very expensive approach and just as the Board was discussing it, our HOAMCO property manager, Paul Frieder, informed me of a presentation that was about to be made by TOPS Software at the HOAMCO offices in Prescott, Arizona. Well, to make a long story shorter, I went to the presentation by Susan Sanders and was thrilled to find out that TOPS had everything we were looking for and more. Susan mailed me a demo CD and, after the Board saw the demo, they quickly approved this new approach. We then set upon customizing our site.

The TOPS web support staff couldn't have been more responsive and helpful. We had our web site up and running with all of our association information in a couple weeks, had a demo at our last Board meeting and did another live demo for all members at our annual meeting. Immediately after the meeting, letters went out notifying the members of their login ID's and passwords and informing them that all future communication from the Association and Board will be through the web site (except for those communications that Arizona law requires to be by mail). We finally have an effective way to communicate with our geographically dispersed membership!

J Terry Manning,
Board Member and Web Administrator
http://www.mystichills.org

Would you like your web site to be spotlighted in the TOPS Home E-Zine? Send us a two or three paragraph email. Be sure to include a description of your community, tell us what led you to getting a Community Web Site, and let us know what features you like best. Send your spotlight to websupport@topssoft.com.

Tutorial

Reviews: 2 or 3 tiered?

This tutorial is to address some confusion we have seen recently regarding the Reviews feature. We have seen a recent trend in administrators treating the Reviews feature as a 2-tiered rather than 3-tiered module structure. The reviews feature has categories, and each category has several review topics. What I see happening is that people will create a new Review Topic for each review of the same vendor. Although at first glance it may appear that the reviews are 2-tiered, they are in fact 3-tiered. (An explanation of tier structures was published in the July 2003 issue.)

The way the Reviews section was intended to be used was as follows:

The 1st tier is the list of review categories. These are general categories used to break the reviews down into the type of service being provided. We recommend that the administrator should be the person to add new categories.
e.g. Pool Vendors, Landscape Vendors, Local Restaurants, Movies, Books...
The 2nd tier is the list of Review Topics. Each review topic should deal with a different vendor, product, movie, restaurant, etc.
e.g. Joe's Pool Care, Brown Sons Landscaping, Mama Mia's, Disney's Tarzan...
The 3rd tier is the collection of reviews for each Review topic. Unlike the other tier structures, this one does not contain a list of links that go to the content of the item. Instead, all reviews for a particular review topic are displayed as one page, similar to a message board topic.
Residents post individual reviews here including number of stars and comments.

My first recommendation to administrators is to go ahead and pre create a number of review categories. This can help guide the residents as to where their reviews should be posted. By adding one category for each type of vendor, and one for each of the other major review types (such as restaurants, amusement venues, movies, books, and TV shows), you can help avoid a lot of the confusion in understanding the category structure.

Most of the confusion we have seen seems to come between the 2nd and 3rd tiers. Residents often do not realize that there is a difference between a review topic and a review. As a result, they will often add a new topic, and type the text of their review into the topic itself. Not only does the resident lose the ability to place a star rating in their review, the topic is now dead to other residents, who must now post reviews under yet another topic. Another situation we have seen is residents will post their own review of a subject that already has a review topic. Both of these scenarios cause the topic to become scattered, and people can no longer read all reviews of a subject on one page. This can be avoided during the creation of a review.

When setting up a review, a user will be prompted to select a category as well as a review topic. By default, it selects (New Category/Topic). If they select this option, the web site will not save the review unless they also add a description of the new category/topic. We recommend, however, that users look through the topics, first to see if a topic has already been created for whatever they want to review.

If you add a feature description to the Reviews section that says something along these lines, it can help to sort your reviews into an organized, user-friendly structure.

Brandon Kelley

Support Tips

Free Graphic Sources

One of the best ways to spice up a community web site and make it more appealing to visitors is through the use of graphics. Animations, photos, and clip art can all help draw attention to important topics and improve a dreary text-heavy page. I wanted to take this opportunity to share with you some of the free online resources you can use on your sites, and also some tips about setting everything up.

Definitions

There are so many types of images available online, that it helps to start off defining the different terms and what they mean:

Clip Art - Clip Art are drawn objects, usually more 'fun' looking than professional. Free clip art is the most prevalent form of free graphics online.
Photo Objects - these are like photo clip art, actual photos where the main subject has been 'cut out' and placed on a white or transparent background. In my opinion, photo objects are the best type to use on community web sites. They are professional, attractive, and of higher quality in general.
GIF Animations - Remember those old flip books you used to 'animate' a character by flipping through the pages? That is essentially how GIF animation works. Each GIF file consists of a series of images that are quickly 'flipped' through by the computer, animating the image.
Stock Photos - stock photography is existing photography which is available for licensing from photographers or their agencies for specific uses. Many sites offer stock photos, but you need to read the fine print. Almost every stock photo on the web has some form of licensing restriction:
- Royalty Free - This means the photographer or agency does not require a royalty fee every time this image is published. This does NOT mean the image is free! Rather, the photographer has given up their royalty rights in exchange for a percentage of the sale fee of the image.
- Free for Non-Commercial Use - If you do happen to find free photos on the Internet, this is likely the license arrangement that will be offered. Basically, by using an image that is free for non-commercial use, you promise not to attempt to re-sell the image, or offer it in any kind of image collection. Most sites that offer this kind of image require one further step on your part - credit for the image. We will discuss this later in the article.

My Favorite Free Image Sites

Morgue File - http://www.morguefile.com - In my opinion, Morgue File is the best free stock photo site on the Internet. Many times, the images on this site are the leftovers from photo shoots, so you will find many different angles and looks for the same subjects. The hardest part is sizing the images down to something you can use on your site! For best sizing results, right click and save the preview image instead of downloading the hi-res version.
Free Foto - http://www.freefoto.com - This is another one of my favorite free stock photo sites. The images here are first class. The only drawback is they were almost all taken in Europe, meaning it is hard to find pictures of 'American' objects, such as telephone booths.
Free Images - http://www.freeimages.co.uk - Another UK site, this one also includes a good smattering of photo objects. The hardest part is navigating the many categories - you need to go back to the main category index each time you want to switch.
#1 Free Clip Art - http://www.1clipart.com - this site is easy to navigate and does not confuse one by mingling links to pay sites in with the actual content. Most of the images are good (about 10% are poor quality) and there are even some photo objects mingled in with the regular clip art.
Barry's Clip Art - http://www.barrysclipart.com - I particularly like the 'light box' format that the images are displayed in this site. The limited number of categories on the menu is deceptive. There are a LOT of images on this site. To see more at a time, change the number per page at the top left corner of the light box to 24. My only caution is to be careful of the links you click on, as some of them lead you to pay image sites.
Cool Archive - http://www.coolarchive.com/clipart.cfm - Cool Archive does not have as much quantity as some of the other sites, but they certainly make up for it in quality. Approximately 50% of the images on the site are photo objects, and the remainder are good quality clip art images. For even more free stuff, go to the home page and check out some of the other freebies they have to offer.

A word of warning: Too much of a good thing is not a good thing! Make sure that you do not go overboard when adding graphics to a page. As a general rule, one or two images is all you really need.

Credit Where Credit is Due

To make sure free images stay free, we should all do our part to 'make a difference'. If you use free images that you found online, you should always give credit back to the site where you found the images. The best way to do this is by providing a link to that site. The Hot Links feature in your community web sites makes this an easy task. Simply create a new hot link, and add some text to this effect: "Some of the images on this site provided by..."

A link is a great way to give credit, but some free image sites ask you to take this credit thing a step further by providing a copyright notice that shows up whenever a web site visitor hovers their mouse cursor over the image. The yellow hover box that pops up is called the image's ALT tag, or alternate text. You can easily add ALT text to the image when you add it to your web site. Here's How:

Assuming you have already inserted your image into the WYSIWYG text editor (See Last Month's Article), click on the image in the editor.
Click the Insert/Modify Image button (Looks like a yellow picture with a mountain scene.)
In the Alternate Text field, enter the copyright notice (Copyright 2003, www.freefoto.com)
Click Modify Image Properties.

I know it takes some extra work on your part, but giving credit for the images you use is important. A simple link can drive visitors to the free image's web site, which improves the chances someone will click on an advertisement, which increases the advertising revenue for the site, which assures that the site will remain free, offering many Netizens like you and I an opportunity to use their high quality web images. See? You really can make a difference, and you get a spiffy looking site in the bargain!

Andrea Drennen

If you have a method of drawing visitors to your site that has been successful for you, please take a moment to share it with your fellow community web site administrators. You can send your tips to websupport@topssoft.com.

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
Brandon Kelley is your TOPS Community Web Site Support Representative
Andrea Master-Drennen is the Internet Services Manager at TOPS Software

TOPS Home E-Zine

Issue #21 - November 2003

Experience TOPS Interactive Web Sites for Yourself!