HOA Web Sites

We are looking to change our web site from an old web program to a newer (hopefully better) web site.
[Disclaimer: I spent 20 years in the IT business as a manager and consultant and know my way around developers and support people].

All the advertising I looked at and a few of the representatives of these companies talk about what they put in your web site. No one is willing to address support of the site. Some companies address your issues by email and few are staffed 24x7.

Perhaps I am living in a different environment! I am more concerned with my site being available when needed than what color border is on the home page.

Could anyone share their experience with maintaining their web site? How often is it not working? Who do you call when it is broke? I want to know what happens when you sign up with a web designer firm rather than a web hosting firm.

Thanks.

In the last six months I don't believe we have had any outages. I put the site up myself on a hosting provider with a guaranteed 99% uptime (measured by the month).

I chose to use Joomla though there are other good, free, open source content management systems. In my opinion, it is the only way to go. You don't need a lot of IT ability to put it up, and they just do what they should for the most part.

$420/year?? You are correct - that is way too much. We use ICDsoft.com for our hosting servic. It's $72/year for hosting, plus $5/year for domain registration. It actually costs us less than that since I have multiple domains with them so they give me a discount.

I set up the web site using Drupal (similar to the Joomla package that Kirk mentioned) and it just works. We have private homeowner discussion areas, shared photo albums, and a community calendar. Fairly simple to set up basic stuff.

Well, I tried to suggest a different way to go with the website. I had a neighbor design one for all of $84/year. Everyone on the board voted to try it except the president (and our HOA is not a democracy... more like a dictatorship). He nixed it. But, he was able to find sponsors to cover the $420 so HOA dues do not go to it. But, we will have to go thru this every year.

I'm glad you have found a more affordable and simple solution, Dwight.

Jackie,

Ditto re: Doug.

Also, though I haven't seen any of our correspondents' web sites, while functional, are they pretty to look at?

Our home page, available to the non-member public if they have the .org addy, is very impressive and a great advert for our neighborhood. That alone, methinks, is worth the price of going with a professional provider such as Community123.