Frequently Asked Questions

The following are the most common questions we hear about our services and their answers. Have a question that's not listed here? Contact us and we'll get back to you right away.

How much does your service cost?

Why should we pay for a website when there are free website options available?

Free website options like Google Pages and Blogger are viable options for communities that wish to have an online presence and have a person or persons willing to volunteer their time to maintain it. Alternatively, your community may have a homeowner with website experience who's willing to setup and maintain your website for free or minimal cost. There's no reason not to utilize these options if they're available.

In our experience, however, sites maintained on a volunteer basis often fall into disuse due to infrequent, irregular updates, sparse content, and out-of-date information. Once that happens, the community loses the advantage of communication that having a website gave them.

Volunteer time is always appreciated, but as most communities learn, depending solely on volunteer help for the day-to-day functions of the community is extremely difficult. The homeowner who volunteered to maintain the site may decide to move, lose interest, or no longer have the time.

This is usually the reason that communities decide to hire a professional management company to handle the finances and violation compliance, a landscaping company to keep the common areas looking nice, and pool contractor to keep the swimming pool clean. In that vein, think of professional website services as a way to keep your web presence well-maintained with a minimum of fuss.

Is the domain owned by the association and is it registered in our name?

Yes, the community association owns the domain name. We register it onto our registrar account so that the publicly-available registration information shows our contact information instead of personal board information (since domain registration requires an individual's name, address, phone number, and email address). The HOA owns the domain, NWWS only acts as the agent with regard to the domain, including renewal and any technical details regarding registration (assigning DNS servers, for example). If at any time the community decides to terminate our services, we would of course assist you in transferring it to a new registrar with no problem. We will not hold your domain "hostage" should you choose to terminate our services.

Does your package include domain registration and hosting?

Yes, the registration and hosting is part of the cost of your website. The site is registered at the time of setup for one year and hosting is included in the monthly maintenance fee. Annual renewal of your domain is charged at the time of renewal each year.

Please note that in order to keep our costs low, we require that your site is hosted on our web server account and that your domain is registered through our domain registration account. This does not mean that we have ownership of your domain -- the association still owns the domain. But by keeping registration and hosting under our own account, we can provide mass administration, passing along the savings to you.

What if my current domain registration hasn't expired yet?

If you wish to stay with your registrar until the account expires, we will work with you and your registrar to keep your registration with your current vendor until it's time for renewal, then facilitate transfer to our registrar account prior to expiration.

Do you offer design services separate from monthly maintenance or vice versa?

No, our service is offered as a complete package. If you currently have a website that you would like us to take over, contact us with the details and we can provide some options.

Can we restrict access to our website to homeowners only?

We do not offer password protection capability on our websites. We do try to make sure that personal information is not available on the website for this reason, including in any meeting minutes that are posted on the site. In our experience, this is more than sufficient for privacy purposes, as most meeting minutes do not contain any other personally identifiable information as long as addresses and phone numbers are removed before posting.

Additionally, governing documents and meeting minutes are public information, and should be kept in mind as such. Although a website is freely available to anyone, most visitors to a website are only people who either already live in the community or who are interested in living there. Community documents and minutes are of little interest to anyone not associated with that community.

We already have a web portal ...do we need a website?

Your management company may already provide a web portal option that allows community members to log into the management company's database to access homeowner's own accounts, change their account information, make online payments, and access some association documents, depending on the capability of the portal provided.

A web portal can be sufficient for your community's needs, providing the basics of document download in addition to homeowner account access. It can also be very affordable. Other features like regular monthly "news" updates, FAQ items, and meeting minutes archiving may or may not be available options. Additionally, your web presence is tied to your community management company, which means you do not have your own domain name and if you should terminate your management service, will no longer have access to the web portal.

A website is your own space on the internet so it has the web address you choose and includes the look and logo you choose. Although it is open to anyone, that can oftentimes be a feature rather than a bug, since it welcomes new homeowners and is easily accessible without needing to remember login and password information. If you choose to to have a website and a web portal, your web portal can be linked from your website so that homeowners can easily access the logon directly from the site -- the best of both worlds.

You may wish to have both a website and web portal service or to have one or the other but not both. Each has advantages and disadvantages and should be considered with other factors, such as the level of community involvement of homeowners, your community identity, and your budget.

What happens if we decide to terminate your services?

While we do want to keep your business, of course, we want to make sure that if you do decide to terminate our services, any transition to a new vendor is as smooth as possible. We will facilitate the transfer of the domain registration to a new registrar, the hosting to a new hosting vendor, and provide the site and all of its files as either an FTP upload via whatever new hosting account you direct us to or burn it onto a CD for you. We do charge a $10 termination fee, but this is only to cover a little bit of our time while we assist in the transition and will not be used to hold the site hostage. You will receive the site exactly as it was on the last update and it's your to do with as you wish. (You purchased the site and its design during set up, so there is no use fee or royalty to continue using the site or make modifications to it.)

This website created and maintained by Northwest Website Services.