Tips and Strategies to Consider while Creating a Web Portal

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Tips and Strategies to Consider while Creating a
Web Portal
A web portal is the need of the hour, and all
businesses are looking for a web portal to
streamline their business operations. With a web
portal for your business, it becomes easy to
manage different stakeholders, including
customers, vendors, or partners, etc. However,
creating a web portal is no childs play. You
cant just think one day that you need a web
portal and launch it the other day. Nope, it
isnt that easy. You need the right approach,
strategy, tips, and of course - technology, to
build it. Cutting corners while building a web
portal may render your portal useless. So, always
ensure that you follow proper steps and tips to
get yourself the right portal for your
business. If you are also interested in creating
a web portal that fits your purpose, heres your
guide to that. This post will help you
understand the right tips and strategies to
consider while developing your web portal. So,
here we go. Things to Consider While Developing
a Web Portal 1. Consider Your Niche, Clients
Requirements, and Budget The first thing to
consider is the business niche and decide whether
to build a B2B portal, B2C portal, or a hybrid
portal. Also decide on whether you want to serve
only domestic markets or both domestic and
international markets. Ideally, your portal is
likely to succeed more if it serves both domestic
and international users. However, remember that
a portal for a global audience will require you
to invest more. This is
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because you may need to include features like
multi-language support, geolocation-based redirect
ion, role-based access to user groups, etc., to
enhance users experience. Focus on your target
customers expectations and how you want your
portal to fulfill them. Decide on the range of
functionalities you want to provide to your
customers or other users with your portal. You
can also think of building your portal as just an
extension of your CRM to support users or as a
full-fledged separate website to enable online
shopping, making payments, or more. Accordingly,
you can offer products, services, customer
support, etc. to your portal users. All these
factors will help you decide on the right budget
for your portal. While deciding on the budget,
you may also need to consider the budget you
would need for advertising your portal. Ensure
that you have formed a budget, keeping in mind
the factor of maximum profitability and ROI. 2.
Decide on the Right Technology There are several
web programming technologies available to create
web portals today. While some of these web
technologies are proprietary platforms, some
others are open source. While enterprises prefer
proprietary platforms due to better security,
small and medium businesses generally prefer
open-source platforms for easy and cost-effective
development. The platform you choose depends on
your portals nature and content management
requirements. Some of the popular PHP-based
open-source platforms that businesses pick are
WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla. Sometimes, web
developers use core PHP code to create a web
portal and integrate an open-source CMS to
update and manage the content. This helps them
bypass the platforms constraints and customize
the content as per their requirements. Considerin
g the following factors can help you create a web
portal
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• The platform should be developer-friendly and
  user-friendly.
• It should be scalable enough to adopt any level
  of intricacy in development.
• It should be cost-effective.
• Keep in mind that the portal you develop is
  highly functional and fulfills all your business
  requirements.
• Conduct Front-End Development and Back-End
  Development
• Once you have picked the right platform, the next
  step is to focus on front-end and back-end
  development. And this is an important step that
  you need to pay extra attention to. Though
  features differ from business to business and as
  per requirements, there are some common front-end
  and back-end features.
• A. Front-End Features
• Secure Login
• Your portal should provide a single and secure
  login to the customers. A new user should be
  able to sign-up directly from the portal. A
  single log-in should provide the user with access
  to both their WordPress account and the portal.
• Support for Default and Custom CRM Modules
• The portal should support all the default modules
  from CRM. It should also enable custom modules
  in the CRM with a relationship with the Contact
  module.
• Case Deflection
• Your portal should allow users to search the
  query first instead of raising a ticket or adding
  a case. This feature will help accelerate the
  support system, reduce the burden on your
  support team and enhance your users experience.
• Proposal Generation
• The portal should let users generate proposals in
  the portal. It should offer product catalogs for
  users to pick the products from, choose the
  quantity, and send proposals to the admin. It

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• should also allow a quick search of products not
  present in the catalog and request unlisted
• products.
• Custom Dashboard
• Customers should have the freedom to customize
  the appearance of the portal. Allow your
  customers to pick the modules they want to see on
  their portal dashboard.
• Real-Time Notifications
• Customers should get real-time notifications
  about the latest actions the admin performs.
  They should view the new records or attachments
  the admin adds, filter notification preferences
  by type of notification, pick any module, etc.
• Multi-Language Support
• Your portal should provide support for multiple
  languages to serve your global customers better.
  There should be a provision to select languages
  and add messages in a specific language from the
  backend to engage users.
• Knowledge Base
• Your customers should have access to a knowledge
  base containing informative videos, blogs, FAQs,
  and more.
• B. Backend Features
• Role-Based Access
• Your portal should restrict the access to
  specific modules to specific customers. The
  rights should be on the need to access basis.
• Generation of Mass Credentials
• The admin should enable the generation of mass
  credentials in the CRM, pull these records, and
  export them in a CSV file. You can also email
  these credentials in bulk to the users.
• Configuration of Custom Modules
• Your portal should allow the configuration of
  custom modules in the portal backend already
  there in CRM without any expenses.

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• Dynamic Layouts
• Your portal should enable and arrange fields and
  layouts in modules you want to appear in your
  portal. Data entry from the portal into CRM
  should be real-time.
• Test Your Portal
• Once you have created the portal, completed the
  front-end and back-end development, the next
  step is to test your portal. There are a few
  things you should test to make it to ascertain
  that it is market-ready.
• See to it that your portal
• Works uniformly across different browsers.
• Is easily accessible and readable.
• Is mobile-friendly.
• If you find any bugs, fix them with the help of
  automated tools or manually as required. When you
  complete your portal, fix bugs, run a final
  check. If you find everything fine, run the
  portal.
• Market Your Portal
• The portal is ready. What next? It is time to
  promote and market your portal. If you dont let
  your customer know that you have a portal now,
  how will they use it? That is why promoting your
  portal is as important as creating it.
• Without proper promotion and visibility, your
  portal wont serve the purpose youve built it
  for. Highlight your portals launch on your
  website and email to your subscribers and
  customers about that. You can also hire
  marketing experts and apply digital marketing
  strategies to redirect more customers to your
  portal.

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A web portal is the future of online businesses,
and it is time you built one for your
business. Without a portal, it is very difficult
to keep up with the pace of advancing technology
and the upliftment of customer experience. If
you are looking for a web portal solution, we can
help you with that. Our SuiteCRM customer portal
is a ready-to-integrate portal solution that you
can use to build your portal. It features secure
access to CRM data, robust ticket management,
advanced knowledge base options, access to
unlimited customers, support for default and
custom modules. Our SuiteCRM client portal is a
highly scalable solution that you can also
customize to fit your business requirements. We
also provide custom portal development solution
service in case you want your portal exclusively
for your business. So, lets join hands to get
you a next-gen web portal for your business. The
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