The site for the Pine Ridge Condo Association was developed with communication in mind.
Prior to the site’s creation, all electronic communication between the neighborhood residents was handled via email, with no single contact list maintained. Members of the Board of Directors had the most accurate lists but, in the interest of privacy, those weren’t made available to the neighborhood as a whole.
The Pine Ridge web site, combined with an associated Facebook page, provided another location where communication could occur. Post to the Facebook page were automatically pulled to the site’s home page. Site administrators could then flag important messages as news, which would give them more space on the home page and make them available in an RSS feed.
Additionally, each resident of the neighborhood was given an account on the site where they could log in to manage their contact preferences.
Their email address and phone number remained visible only to the board, but they could opt in to a mailing list based on the data in this user-managed directory. Any messages sent to a specific email address would be forwarded to all of the neighborhood homeowners. To protect against spammers, only messages from email addresses already on the list would be forwarded on.
By creating the web site, a place for static information was also made available. Documents such as the association bylaws – public documents but sometimes hard to find – were given a home on the site to be more accessible.
The above text and images were copied directly from the portfolio of my former development company, O6 Web Services, as I imported it over to this blog. It was not updated for re-publishing. This project launched in October 2012.