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- Business-to-Business Portals (usually an Extranet).
- Portals for Business to Customers (typically Client portals).
- Intranets are internal business portals.
Web portals are any access gateway that allows users to log in to the backend cloud systems of a business via a web user interface to access sensitive data and services. This data is typically customer data. The term "web portal" can be used interchangeably with B2C client portals - websites that allow customers to log in and access critical data and personal information such as financial data, medical records, and job data.
The extranet is usually referred to when the term "web portal" is used to describe B2B portals, which give partners, vendors, and other associates access to vital internal data. Intranets are used when internal staff have access to central repositories through a web-based system.
Web portals provide users with access to data via the cloud, i.e., via website-based portals. However, one of their most significant and important advantages is the ability to customize and personalize access for different parties based on the needs of each party. Web portals can be enhanced with authentication and authorization functions by implementing a robust control system. This will give them enhanced security, typically 256-bit TLS, and customized access to data for different parties. These include business partners, associates, and customers.
Financial systems are frequently associated with web portals serving clients (client portals). Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act and other financial legislation apply to these systems. Depending on the region, however, there may be additional security legislation to protect PII.
Web portals are a great way to provide remote access functionality for your private cloud repository and all parties involved. This can help you speed up operations, improve collaboration and communication and streamline workflows.
Types of Web Portals
There are many different types of web portals that can be used for different industrial purposes. These include B2B portals and B2C portals, as well as internal company portals. Web portals, regardless of their type, are web applications embedded in websites that act as a portal to cloud-based company repositories.
All web portals are evolving into web platforms, which integrate with marketing systems, IT enterprise components, and other corporate IT systems. This creates an entire corporate IT infrastructure that allows for automated, integrated, and consistent data syncing throughout a company's backend infrastructure. It makes sense that web portals/platforms should be a core part of any company's digital customer service strategy, whether it is a customer-facing portal or a vendor/partner-facing portal.
Client Portals
Client portals are B2C web portals used to provide customers with access to their vital data (e.g., banks, medical institutions, financial institutions, etc.) or to other company data through a login system on a website. Client portals are used by customers who log in to their websites and access their medical records or bank account balance.
Intranets and Staff Portals
LANs are internal networks that do not interact or face the Internet. The intranet of a company often includes web portals. These allow staff and relevant personnel to access their dashboards and gain access to the company's repositories. This may include project documents, financial sheets, blueprints, or collaborative documents. These intranet-based portals are often used by the management to streamline and manage workflows, team operations, and projects.
Vertical Portals
Vertical web portals, which are usually associated with extranets/web portals for B2B, provide information about a particular industry or domain. They may include documents, files, articles, data, and project details.
Horizontal Portals
Horizontal portals provide a good alternative to vertical portals. They are linked to many different industries and are aimed at providing a common audience with data and tools.
Examples Of Portals
There are many web portals that companies of all sizes use, whether they're B2B portals or B2C client portals.
Sales Portal
An internal sales portal is a good example of how companies can streamline their sales process by using a robust web-based portal. A sales portal allows all departments within a business to work together with the sales team to make sure that the offer made to clients or customers during the marketing phase is what the sales team closes. The sales teams can work with the sales officers to streamline the sale process by sharing critical documents and powerful sales tools.
Project Management Portal
These portals allow executives and managers to manage strategic plans and documents, as well as key teams in the organization, thereby eliminating the need to hold time-consuming meetings. These portals can be externally facing to share critical documents and data.
Customer Portal Solution
A B2C portal is one way to streamline customer service interactions. It allows customers and clients to access a dashboard with their own data (including PII) to order services or make additional purchases. A portal of this type can improve customer retention.
Membership Portal
Companies that provide specific services can use a membership portal, which is accessed via an authentication login. After logging in, users can access premium content, such as datasheets, music, documents, and training materials.
CRM Portal
A CRM portal can be used by companies as an internal system to facilitate robust collaboration between marketing and sales teams in order to manage customers through a central repository for critical customer data. A CRM portal can streamline data analysis and customer retention strategies and provide real-time information to remote workers and internal staff for marketing campaigns and customer loyalty strategies.
HR Portal
HR portals are a great internal system for companies that need to manage all aspects of Human Resources. A network of internal HR portals allows HR officials to collaborate with C-level executives who have access to data on all employees within the company. This includes tax information, schedules for work, workers' compensation, and more.
Intranet Portal
Intranet portals are a type of enterprise-level application that's associated with web portals within an intranet. It allows internal staff to access data and services through the intranet website using a login system.
Extranet Portal
Extranet portals are Web Portal Consulting that exist within extranet spaces and allow users to access data or services from the extranet via a website.
Corporate Portal
A corporate portal is an amalgamation of B2B portal development and B2C in that it provides access to company internal data/services for both customers and business partners.
Web Portal Software Benefits Business
We recommend that you take into consideration the following advantages of launching a web-based portal.
- Improved user, customer, and employee experience by providing a convenient platform to interact with your business.
- Access to relevant information on a single platform in real-time, 24/7.
- Communication between all parties involved.
- Personalization of content.
- Customer loyalty is key to growing business.
- The ability to reach multiple audiences at once.
- Data on customer behavior, interests, and needs.
You can see that your business will benefit greatly from creating a web-based portal. We will provide all services you need if you don't have a clue where to look for seasoned developers who can create a web portal. Our software engineers are highly skilled in creating web solutions to meet a variety of business requirements. Our dedicated team is capable of handling the most difficult task while still ensuring that our clients are comfortable with terms and conditions.
Use Web Portals to Reach Business Goals
Web portals have become a critical part of web-based applications that serve many purposes across industries. They allow for remote, authenticated access to data that is essential to projects, operations, and short-term as well as long-term workflows. These portals allow companies to quickly and easily share important information and data with their base without having to rely upon physical mail, email, or faxing. Emails, for example, have strict attachment limitations that do not apply to cloud-based websites.
Web portals offer three important internal advantages to companies, as well as three external benefits:
- Integration: Companies that can integrate all corporate and customer data into a single backend system will find it easier to manage data.
- Consistency: By integrating backend data from different platforms and allowing remote access via the Web, companies can store and rely upon consistent data which is easily shared and collaborated on.
- Personalization: Portals are built so that specific users can have personalized access (including internal staff), allowing companies to contextualize both the experience of internal staff as well as external clients/customers.
External benefits include:
- Access Control: Businesses can control who has access to their internal cloud repositories and also what they can access through secure authentication and authorization mechanisms (web-based).
- Customer Service/User access: Enterprises are able to grant clients and customers access to their PII remotely (and securely), streamlining operations and customer service.
- Marketing Management: By automating marketing campaigns for customers and managing them through the backend, marketing managers can personalize the web portal access according to customer behavior.
By combining the key benefits of web portals, a company can increase its bottom line by reducing turnover and overhead costs.
The Streamlined Access to Resources and Information
Web portals allow users to access internal resources, personal information, and important information. This helps streamline operations, reduce customer turnover, and lower overhead. Banks, for example, allow customers to modify and access their financial account details via a web-based portal. This eliminates the need to physically visit a bank.
You can Control what each User has Access to
Web portals are able to be customized according to the user. This gives clients and/or business partners an exclusive view of critical data and information a company wishes to share with them.
Increase Customer Retention and MRR
Customers will continue to use your services if you streamline and optimize the systems that they interact with. Convenience and ease of use can improve retention rates and reduce churn while also reducing overhead.
Reduce other forms of Time-Intensive Communication
By using a web portal for customers and others correctly, you can reduce the workload on internal communication and customer service workflows, as well as the associated costs. The web portals allow customers to perform basic tasks such as searching for data, obtaining information, and completing other activities without having to call your company. The internal web portal allows members to collaborate on projects, share data and avoid meetings.
Building a Web Portal
Web Portals are robust web applications that are built into websites. They allow users to access important data and services. For internal staff, the web portal can provide increased visibility of inter-departmental activities and access to important documents, blueprints, or strategic plans. It may also offer project management apps and systems, which allows collaboration and remote working. Portals allow customers to access their critical PII, as well as other services. This can help streamline interactions between your company and clients.
It takes a full-stack engineer who is experienced in developing web applications to build a server-side portal that feeds the client side (via a web page).
Read More: Here are Seven Ways you can Take your B2B Web Portal Development to the Next Level
Choose if you will build in-house or with a trusted partner
In order to build a web portal, the first thing you need to decide is whether it will be built by in-house engineers or trusted partners. In the short term, utilizing the expertise and resources of trusted partners can help you save development time and money. It also allows for a custom portal to be created by experts with the knowledge and experience of meeting the needs of various organizations. In many cases, hiring trusted partners means that maintenance is handled by the partner. This gives your staff more time for other important tasks.
In-house web portal development allows your company to customize a solution to its "pain points" and to change the project timelines or priority features as you see fit without consulting a third party. Your in-house engineers will also be able to learn how to maintain the portal in an optimal way after customizing a solution that is unique and tailored to your business needs.
You can be sure that your portal will be secure
In today's world, ensuring the security of a portal is critical. To ensure the security of the portal, penetration testers will attempt to hack it. Security administrators will patch and maintain the web portal constantly to prevent costly data breaches. Security must be considered when designing and developing authentication and authorization mechanisms.
Web portals are similar to other web apps, so it is important to study and mitigate common vulnerabilities, including Cross-Site Scripting (XSS), Web Buffer Overflows (WBO), and SQL Injection, among others.
Choose the method of Construction
The next step after deciding who will develop and design the web portal is to decide how the portal will be built. It is possible to choose between "one-size fits all" off-the-shelf options or custom builds, which are created by engineers. Custom builds may be more expensive than off-the-shelf options, but they are usually designed to address specific pain points that an organization may have. They are also tailored to the enterprise's needs.
The Off The Shelf Option
These solutions are usually integrated with Content Management System software solutions, which are used to create and design websites before they are hosted on a server. These solutions provide pre-made web pages
Web apps can be easily integrated into your website and help with sales, customer management, and client PII. They are usually made to scale and offer a wide range of additional features and actions. However, these options may not have the functions your company needs to address its "pain points."
Custom Built
It is more difficult, expensive, and time-consuming to create a custom web portal. However, it can be more beneficial in solving your company's pain points, as they are designed and developed to meet the unique and specific needs of your business. Three factors are required to build a custom website from scratch:
- Language: Custom web portals need a powerful, scalable language that does not have too many security flaws.
- Database: Custom web portals typically use a robust Relational Database Management System.
- Front-end: The front-end interface is what your clients, customers, and associates will interact with.
First, the programming language is an obvious choice. The more important decisions are which database to use and what front-end for your web portal.
Select A Development Language
When choosing a language for development, there are many choices. However, only a handful are relevant when considering long-term viability and market adoption, as well as the availability of developers who have the required skills and experience. C#, Java, and Python are among the options.
Select A Database
When building a web-based portal that connects with a database, enterprises have a wide range of options. RDBMSs tend to be the most popular choice for web portals and web applications. It is important to choose a scalable enterprise-level RDBMS or a tried-and-true, open-source system such as Microsoft SQL Server when choosing an RDBMS that will be used for your custom-built web portal. Other options include MySQL and Oracle, IBM DB2, as well as cloud-based DBaaS options.
Selecting a Front End
It is important to ensure that your web application has a robust and healthy front-end framework. This will be used for the app development process and implementation of your portal on the client side. These frameworks are usually associated with Javascript, which is used in conjunction with CSS and HTML for the development of the front-end part of the web application. Front-end frameworks can include:
- React
- Vue
- Angle
- Django
- jQuery
React, Vue.js, and Angular are the three most popular and common options. They all have a positive impact on productivity and performance, especially when implementing client-side web applications (Front End) such as web portals. This is due to their powerful, dynamic libraries, stable and scalable technologies, and comprehensive, dynamic libraries.
Combination of Both
A "hybrid approach" may be a good option for your business. This involves building some parts of the web portal (e.g., front-end system) using off-the-shelf builds and other parts (e.g., backend database system) with custom builds. Businesses, especially SMEs, can save money by using off-the-shelf builds for commonly used web portal systems. They don't need to pay extra money for custom builds.
Use a platform that allows for detailed customization
Certain proprietary frameworks and platforms - like specific Content Management Systems -- allow you to create custom, highly customized web portals in a website-developing package that offers off-the-shelf options for quick and affordable website/web portal development. These platforms offer a seamless development project experience and are a more affordable option to implement the hybrid approach.
Using Open Source Systems
Some CMSs, such as WordPress, offer an inexpensive way to develop web portals on a website. They also allow you to choose between using off-the-shelf parts or custom-built components.
What is the cost of creating a web portal?
The cost of developing web portals is highly dependent on several factors, just like any other software tailored to your company's needs. Development costs usually range from $20,000 to $80,000. Let's look at some of the factors that influence the final amount.
- The number and complexity of the required features;
- How many user roles can you create for your portal?
- Integrations with custom and third-party systems.
- The logic of a website portal is unique.
- Design requirements;
- The platform was chosen for the creation of a web portal, customization, and technology stack.
- Compliance with the regulatory requirements;
- Scalability, performance, and security requirements are all important. ;
- The type of collaboration with a team for development.
Different approaches can be taken to build a relationship with engineers. Some companies prefer to hire their own specialists, while others prefer external development teams. If you belong to the second group and want to hire developers for your company, then read our tips.
You still haven't found a web portal developer?
We are happy to assist you at cisin! We can turn even the most ambitious ideas into reality thanks to our strong practical skills and theoretical extensive knowledge.
Make sure your portal is compliant with data laws
Remember to follow best practices when creating a Web Portal that is robust, needs-based, addresses the "pain points" of your business, and improves the bottom line. It is important to harden your systems, ensure complete data security and make sure all your client and customer PII are encrypted and unreachable by hackers or malicious users.
It is crucial to ensure compliance with both the California Consumer Privacy Act law (a California law that specifies how data about customers is used), and the General Data Protection Regulation legislation of the European Union (a comprehensive EU privacy regulation that dictates the way companies use and secure customer information) Compliance with the laws of either country is essential when doing business. This includes keeping client data secure, not using customer data without consent, and maintaining complete data security in order to avoid costly data breaches and expensive fines.
All web portals that deal with financial data must comply with the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act to ensure all data and information about customers is only shared with their consent.
Compliance with privacy and data legislation will allow you to protect both your company and customers from malicious users. This results in an improved bottom line and top line.
If you want B2C Portal Development and b2b portal development you can contact cisin.
