A web portal is a web-based gateway that allows different parties involved in a business to access an organization’s data as per their needs and roles. With a web portal, an organization can manage data and the flow of information better and more efficiently.
Creating a web portal also helps minimize reliance on traditional ways of exchanging crucial information like calls, fax, or even emails. There are different types of web portals depending on the purpose you intend to fulfill. Some primary types are customer portal, supplier portal, partner portal, affiliate portal, etc.
People sometimes use the terms website and web portal interchangeably, but there are differences. Creating a web portal is not the same as creating a website.
While a website includes web pages that anyone can access, a web portal contains information dedicated to a domain. Unlike a website, a web portal requires you to use login credentials instead of a URL to access information on it. While a website boosts digital presence and traffic, a web portal provides relevant information to different users as per their roles and requirements to optimize business processes.
Stages of Creating a Web Portal
Creating a web portal requires you to brainstorm and plan well in advance. Before you start your web portal development steps, you should have a clear idea about who will use your portal. You should also understand that your portal should align with your business requirements and incorporate the latest trends in the web portal development process, for your industry.
Below are the four primary web portal development steps you need to follow:
1. Planning
The first stage in web portal development is foolproof planning. This stage is crucial to creating a web portal and involves figuring out a clear objective of your portal.
There are a few things you may need to consider before creating a web portal for your organization. Find out what the primary goal of your portal is and who your target users are. Also, figure out how your web portal will benefit your target users.
Once you are clear with all this, the next step is deciding on the features to include. While features may differ according to industries and requirements, there are some standard features you can include.
- PersonalizationPersonalization is an important feature that you can’t do without. By giving role-based access to different users, you can let them see only the information they need. This delivery of relevant information not only helps personalize user experience but also enhances security.
- NavigationEasy navigation is the key to enrich users’ browsing experience. Therefore, make sure that you make ease of navigation your priority y while creating a web portal to make access to relevant info handy.
- ResponsivenessResponsiveness is indispensable in this fast-paced mobile age. Ensure that your portal is fully responsive and works properly across all operating systems and screen sizes. Consistency in navigation and ease-of-use should stay intact throughout to engage users.
2. Architecture and Design
Deciding on the architecture is of vital importance when creating a web portal. The look-and-feel matters a lot for a web portal. There are a few components to consider integrating while creating a web portal to make it more attractive as below.
- Include varied options of communication to facilitate real-time communication with your customers. Offer live chat, chatbots, hotline, email service, etc. to your customers.
- See to it that the font and theme of the overall web portal and individual sections are uniform everywhere.
- Pay special focus on images. Keep them neat, high-quality, and comprehensive while creating a web portal.
- Don’t go for either excessively gaudy colors or for too dull colors. Maintain a fine balance between them to give your portal a formal appearance.
- Don’t forget to include a search option to take your target users’ experience to the next level.
3. Development
A web portal may be for one or more different parties and the features to integrate while creating a web portal differs accordingly.
In the development phase, some important aspects to consider are user-friendly navigation, security, placement of images, scalability, etc.
4. Testing and Maintenance
The last stage of the web portal development process is testing and maintenance. Testing helps you detect the bugs that crept in during the development process. Running multiple types of Quality Assurance tests helps iron out small issues and errors to develop completely bug-free portals.
Coming to tests you can perform while creating a web portal, there are load testing, software testing, usability testing, integration testing, etc. These tests will ascertain that your portal is ready to deploy and use.
Some major factors to check before creating a web portal and deploying it are:
- Cross-platform compatibility
- Responsiveness
- User experience and navigation
- Optimization
- Features and functioning
- User interface
- Quality and relevant content
If you complete the testing phase rightly, you can increase your portal users’ satisfaction with a seamless experience. This helps you grow your portal usage, strengthen relations with users, and contribute to brand-building.
After testing and launch comes maintenance. It includes technology upgrades, technology migration, addition of new functionalities, etc. It is necessary to ensure that your portal stays up-to-date and in line with the latest technology and demands.
Are you also a business owner looking to develop a portal for your business? Well, CRMJetty is the right destination for all types of portal requirements you have. We have a team of tech enthusiasts and certified developers who have over a decade of experience in portal development.
Just name the CRM you use, the portal type you want, and your industry, and we’ll build one for you. We offer launch-ready and fully scalable portal solutions for Salesforce, Dynamics, SuiteCRM, and SugarCRM. Our seasoned development team also understands that the “one-size-fits-all” concept doesn’t always work. So, they are by your side if you also need any type of customization in our ready-made portal solution to fit your business needs exactly.
Our development team first collects and analyzes your requirements, matches them with our portal’s features, and customizes the features if required. We also provide service and maintenance for your old portal to make it modern on request.
We can help you build a unique portal solution exclusive to your business from scratch in case you feel that the launch-ready portal doesn’t fit your expectations and requirements.
So, let us help you build the best portal for your organization!
Factors that Affect the Web Portal Development Process Cost
1. Outsourcing or On-Premise
This is a big factor while determining the cost of creating a web portal. Typically, outsourcing portal development costs less than on-premise development. But sometimes, outsourcing your web portal development process can backfire if you pick a less reliable platform. So, choosing the right outsourcing partner for your portal development.
2. Functions
The functions you choose to keep in your portal also determine your portal’s cost. The more and complex the features and functions, the higher the development budget goes. Some significant functions you can include are profiles, advanced search, data feeds, document management, communities, etc.
3. The Developers’ Skills
The more refined and proficient your development team is, the better your final portal will be. Even an ordinary developer can make a portal for you but it won’t have that touch of perfection. So, the more proficient the development team you choose, the higher the development cost is.
Run after quality, not after quantity.
Don’t compromise on the development team’s skills to end up paying a bigger price in the form of a poor performance later.
4. Elements to Include
The cost of creating a web portal depends a lot on the elements or components that you intend to include alongside the functions. Take note of the fact that even a simple website can be more budget-intensive than an apparently fancy site. The reason is the difference in the custom factors and elements in both websites.
The more custom elements and components, the more time it will take to develop them. Accordingly, the developers will hire a charge cost resulting in a higher development cost.
Want help optimizing your web portal development cost? We can help you with that by analyzing your portal requirements and giving you the right estimate to prevent hassles later.
Advantages of a Web Portal
A web portal is highly valuable for an organization in various ways.
First, it helps improve interaction with customers and enables them to connect with you in multiple ways in real-time. This helps boost their satisfaction level and brand loyalty.
Second, it also helps bring down the burden on your business support agents’ shoulders. Instead of manually handling different redundant queries and questions, they can focus on bigger queries and issues. This way, it can help increase their overall efficiency and productivity.
Third, it helps you streamline internal and external processes between different departments and parties. You can provide your different employees in different departments with role-based access to the relevant information they need. Similarly, you can allow external parties involved like vendors, partners, affiliates, etc. to access the relevant information via a secure log-in. This helps you reduce their dependence on calls and emails for every small query or detail.
Fourth, it helps you manage and view all your CRM data centrally on the go. This helps you save time to log in to CRM every time to access any info. You can simply view the info you want right from within the portal by integrating it with your CRM.
Fifth, by streamlining your business processes and improving your customer experience, you can also increase overall customer engagement. This proves to be helpful in bringing you more customers and retaining them in the long run.
So, you can see that a web portal is key to improving your interactions, overcoming productivity roadblocks, and drive higher efficiency in your organization.
If you also think it’s time for you to consider a good portal solution for your business, CRMJetty can be your partner in this journey. We are a bunch of skilled tech developers and take pride in introducing ourselves as the champions of portal development services.
About CRMJetty
CRMJetty is a hub of portal solutions for major popular CRM platforms including Dynamics, Salesforce, SuiteCRM, and SugarCRM. We, at CRMJetty, give you the best portal solution to suit your business needs at the best competitive prices.
We follow both approaches – from-scratch and custom-build. In case your requirements are not very different from our portal solution, we follow the custom-build approach. We analyze your customization requirements, figure out the scope for the customizations you need, and proceed if they are feasible.
In case they are far different from the features of scalable portal solutions, we go the extra mile to get you what you want. Our development team comes to the front to lead your project, analyze your requirements, goals, and long-term outcomes. After that, they plan and prepare a roadmap of development. As the portal development process begins, they keep giving iterative updates time and again. In the end, the QA team tests it and works to ascertain it is fit for the final launch. Eventually, we hand it over to you once we are convinced it is all set to enter the market. Our work doesn’t end here though. If you ask, we provide care and maintenance support as well to help you get familiar with the new portal and eliminate the initial hiccups.
So, if you still haven’t found your portal development partner, hire our 270+ strong portal development company with a track record of 70+ custom portal integrations spanning 80+ countries.
Get your portal off the ground in no time with CRMJetty!
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