Agaric is honored to provide the web development service to Housing finance agencies (HFAs) so that they can achieve their missions of providing affordable housing opportunities to people looking to buy or rent homes.
What HFAs Need From Their Website
From our experience working with HFA's, here are some of the main features we have found they are look for in their site:
- it looks modern and attractive
- content managers can easily and conveniently manage their multimedia content
- features and a structure that make content easily discoverable
- contact forms with email notification systems that ensure HFA staff reliably respond to inquiries
- accessibility
- translation
Agaric will deliver all these requirements.
In their web development provider HFAs want honesty, quick response time, easy communication, expertise, and reliable service at a competitive price.
You can find all these qualities in Agaric.
Below are a few examples of features Agaric has delivered to two of our HFA clients - North Carolina Housing Finance Agency and Vermont Housing Finance Agency - that demonstrate our experience.
Discoverable Content
HFAs share all kinds of information: educational materials, news articles, financial and organizational reports, loan provider directories, financing applications.
It is tremendously important that site visitors are able to easily find content they are looking for and to discover new content that interests them.
Content listing pages with filters are a great way to achieve this objective.
One example of this on the North Carolina Housing Finance Agency website is their directory of mortgage lenders.
The directory is conveniently searchable so loan seekers can easily find lenders in their area. Each listed lender has a convenient button that links to a form for contacting that them.
All of this data is managed in a database maintained separately that is made accessible via an API that the website syncs data from. Using an API as a centralized source of data saves the need for staff to manage data in multiple locations.
Sharing Information
Communicating the agency’s work to the public is also a key part of an HFA’s activity.
Making news, blog posts, press releases and other content easily discoverable is an important part of an HFA site.
North Carolina Housing Finance Agency’s website features a news page where articles can be filtered by year and to some pre-defined article types.
Vermont Housing Finance Agency has a similar news page for filtering their news content:
Webforms
As service providers, HFAs need to be responsive to people looking for service, so reliable contact forms are a must.
Today the web is flooded with bots that crawl sites and add artificial submissions, so tools that help filter out bad submissions are a required feature.
Agaric makes sure that your webforms are filtering out bad submissions through the effective use of CAPTCHAs and user submission email confirmations.
Here are two screenshots of NCHFA and VHFA's webforms.
Contact Us for Help with Your HFA Website
Agaric has had a great time serving our HFA clients and we would love the opportunity to share our skills and experience with more HFAs.
If you are interested in working with us please contact us so that we can set up a meeting to discuss how we can help with your site.
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