What is a portal website and how do you build it?

It’s an exciting era for ecommerce. Businesses with portal websites are having much success with trends showing a 4.4% yearly increase in online shoppers. With such statistics, you can expect an increase in demand for tech resources that will facilitate consumer engagements and offer reliable digital customer experiences. 

Key takeaways

Portal websites have eased organizational processes by facilitating secure access to critical data and enabling short- and long-term workflows. Also remember:

• Building a web portal will require an easy-to-use interface, informative content and access control mechanisms.
• Companies experience internal and external benefits from web portals. Internal benefits include processes that streamline and make internal operations easier. External advantages involve improved management and tracking of customers’ activities.
• Optimizing your content will help you rank higher within the SERPs.

So, what is a portal website? This is a web-based platform that gathers data from varied sources like search engines and emails into a single user interface, customizable by the user through a portlet. 

Portal websites are responsible for transforming the online business ecosystem. Interactions between organizations, suppliers and customers have become more effective as collection and sharing of information has become easier. 

How portal websites are transforming digital experiences

Web portals provide a web-based system that yields key organizational processes, including secure access to critical data and enabling short- and long-term workflows. Organizations find it easier dispersing information to relevant parties without relying on physical mails or emails, which usually have strict attachment limits. 

With that said, companies experience internal and external benefits from web portals. Internal benefits refer to how portal websites streamline and make internal operations easier. Meanwhile, external advantages mostly include the gains that portal webs bring about, in terms of management and tracking of customers’ activities on the site. The three major internal and two external benefits from web portals include:

Internal advantages

• Integration – Web portals allow for organizations to integrate corporate data and customers in the backend of a single platform, which in turn eases data administration. According to the WebFX report, organizations lose close to $2.6B in revenue yearly due to slow loading sites. To curb this, it's prudent to consider high-end plugs that will enhance the functionality and speeds of your website to ensure seamless integration.
• Personalization – Personalizing web portals for specialized access lets organizations contextualize the digital experiences of clients and the staff. 
• Consistency – Uniting backend data across platforms through the cloud allows a company to have consistent and reliable data it can share and act upon. 

External advantages

• Marketing management – ecommerce businesses have the flexibility to customize web portals based on the behavior of the clients. It allows the in-house marketing personnel to tailor the marketing campaigns and manage them better through the backend system. 
• Access control – Organizations can utilize authorization and verification mechanisms to control access to certain cloud repositories. It ensures only allowed parties have access to sensitive applications or information that would otherwise put the operations of the company at risk.

Building a portal website

Building a web portal is a strategic process that requires planning and experienced engineers familiar with the comprehensive web applications. With a well-structured plan, your website should maximize online visibility while minimizing risk. 

Outsourcing developers will give you time to evaluate the competence of the prospective engineers. It will allow you to work with experts having reliable knowledge to develop and customize portals that suit the needs of specific organizations. It will also relieve the internal staff of maintenance responsibilities and give them time to focus on other roles.

Regardless of your preferred choice, it's recommended to follow along with each process to ensure the developers don't miss out on important details.  Key elements your website needs to have include:

1. UI and UX

Your impression is everything to customers unless you want to have a high bounce rate. According to recent data, simple search and navigation contribute up to 61% of sales in ecommerce. Such statistics should be an eye opener to any aspiring web portal builder on the importance of having an easy-to-navigate interface relative to the conversion rates. 

Consider the form of your portal, that is, what the user sees when they log in. Form can be a dashboard or a gateway. Both can support personalization of information, but the gateway designs tend to have standard portlets that allow for automatic content automation within apps. They require minimal maintenance and are easy to develop. Below is a good example of a gateway portal from grants.gov.

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