In 2022 the worldwide smartphone subscription surpassed 6 billion, and it is expected to increase by more than 100 million in the next few years. US, India, and China are the countries with the highest number of smartphone users.

This data proves that you can find your potential customers on digital platforms. Hence digital presence is an essential part of your business. Along with website development, web Portal development became very common among various companies to leverage the digital platform fully. The portal development has gained a lot of prevalence in the last few years due to its long list of benefits to any business.

When it comes to digital transformation you have to look for digital solutions based on your business requirements. This custom Web Portal development is a proven effective way to offer your audience a unified digital experience. This type of software enables enterprises to automate various processes and increases customer, employee, and partner engagement in the business.

With web portals, you can serve a community of users through a wide range of incredible features (notification, message boards, workflow, content dissemination, etc.) that make the customer journey personalized and easier. In short, we can say that you can optimize business processes, provide better customer service, and easily manage business operations by the development of portal for your business.

Portal development has become an integral part of online marketing. Due to the increasing popularity of these portals, the demand for Web Portal Development services also increases.

Many people confuse web portals with websites. Are you one of them?

Then this blog is for you. Here you will get basic information about web portals, their functionality, and their types. How can it help grow your business? How can you develop one for your business? How much is the cost to create a web portal? This blog will be a full guide on web portals, so pursue it till the end.
Without further delay, let’s dive deeper.

What is a Web Portal?

A web portal is a special type of website designed to serve unique purposes and gather and present information in a personalized and more diverse way. It is basically created to offer personalized information to users, such as safety manuals or a customer website, employee training, and so on. Moreover, these portals are used to improve customer, employee, and supplier interaction with the business and enhance information collaboration.

Although web portals are just like websites, providing information to users or readers but not the same. A website is a virtual face of your business carrying all information related to your product and services. While a web portal is created to cater to the specific need of a group of people. Portals have users who are looking for particular information. For example, in job portals, you can get all information regarding job openings from various companies in different cities. You just need to sign up on these portals to access all the information.

We can easily and quickly access these online business portals on all devices (desktop, smartphone, tablet, etc.). Web portals replicate the look and feel of your business and hence provide excellent control over day-to-day business processes.

What is Web Portal Development?

A web portal is a single point for accessing various information of a company. This information can be accessed or categorized by certain links. By developing portal, you can access information related to products, company articles, suppliers or vendor lists, etc.
The portal development includes sign-up or log-in by users to extract information provided by the web owners. The information or data is pulled from different sources and conveniently located in one place. Moreover, you can also communicate with other portal users.
The development of web portal requires expertise in website building, client-side and server-side scripting, rich application development, registration systems, and many more. Thus, in order to get a feature-rich and highly functional web portal, hire a dedicated software development team.

Different Types of Web Portal Development

There are numerous web portals that cater to the diverse business needs of different businesses. Businesses mostly opt for custom web portal development services to get customized solutions. Let’s cover the different types of web portals to serve the specific purpose of businesses.

• Horizontal Portal

The purpose of this type of portal is to provide all information to users while they search for services or something else. All companies mostly use it, which is like a common platform providing an entry point and data and tools to a general audience. Some of the examples of horizontal Portal are governmental, educational, cultural ones, etc.

• Vertical Portal

Companies use vertical Portals to provide certain information associated with services to users. These are also called vortals. These are associated with a single domain or industry and provide documents, tools, data files, and project information related to a specific sector.

• Customer Portal

This portal is used to streamline customer service processes and interactions via a B2C customer portal. The customer portal provides customers and clients with access to a personalized data dashboard. As this portal eases down the customer journey, there will be an increase in the customer retention rate

• Membership Portal

This portal provides specific services to members and subscribers via an authenticated login system. After login, users can access premium data or services, such as entertainment medium, datasheets, documents, music, training materials, etc.

• B2B Portals

This portal provides companies with well-organized customer self-service to offer information to customers and achieve better post-order management.

• B2C Portals

This portal helps drive sales by providing better customer service. Moreover, it helps companies to develop trust among customers by establishing long-lasting and loyal relationships.

• Corporate Portal

It is a hybrid of B2B and B2C portals wherein customers and business associates can access internal company data or services.

• CRM Portal

Companies use the CRM portal for the comprehensive and robust collaboration of the sales and marketing team. The main purpose of the CRM portal is to manage customers via a central repository of critical customer data.

• Partner Portal

This portal is best for industries like healthcare and real estate, where instead of depending on the portal, you need to have various partners who can help to take your business forward.

Business Challenges Solved by Web Portal Development

Web portal development is the best way to interact with your customers and employees in the most effective way. Because a web portal provides a systematic structure for your content hence helps to engage visitors most compellingly. The best part about using web content is that it is easy to manage once set up properly and enables you to publish content rapidly.

Web portals make it easier to inform users about their services and products and keep them updated on new product launches or any latest business achievements. Web portal solves the problems that arise in various industries; for example.
• Web portals are the most feasible option if you want to target and rebrand a specific group of users.

• With these web portals, you can stand ahead of competitors as they provide a professional look to your business.

• The private sector creates a web portal for employees to manage scheduling, workflow, human resources affairs, contact information, document management, etc.

• For each industry, the requirements of the web portal are different. Like for university, you might need only one portal in which students can register for classes via a login. While in school, there will be a separate portal for faculty to submit grades, manage attendance, etc.

• These portals are also used as the basis for news publishing organizations and community-based websites. It will result in effective management of the tasks associated with being a content aggregator or online publisher.

• Web portals provide personalized access to specific groups of users, allowing companies to contextualize the experiences of both external and internal staff.

These are some of the common problems solved by web portals. But this is not the end; the list of enticing benefits of developing a web portal for your business is very long. Let’s cover some common benefits of having a web portal for your enterprise.

Benefits of Web Portal Development

• More Versatility & High Security

The portal development provides excellent versatility as users can easily access company details online across multiple devices. Moreover, these web portals offer customers and staff a high level of security, and they can derive information from these portals without any fear of impending cybersecurity incidents.

• Improved Hiring and Training of Employees

Onboarding and training new employees require the investment of money, time, or resources. But by developing a portal you can ease this process by creating a single access point for information. For example, you can keep all the job applications in the portals and, based on assessment, update the status of their application.

• Improved Customer Retention and MRR

The web portals streamline and optimize the company and customer data and resources, encouraging customers to build loyalty towards you. It results in a reduced churn rate, improved customer retention rates, improved MRR (monthly recurring revenue rates), and reduced company overhead.

• Seamless Integration & Customization

According to a Forbes report, 34% of customers make unplanned purchases if the brand personalizes the content as per the specific needs of the group of users. Hence, custom web portal development can enhance the business success rate. Along with customization, customers like a streamlined experience when using a web portal. Moreover, we can easily integrate various high-end plugins into the portal, leading to enhanced functionality and speed.

• Effective Access to Business Information

In today’s face-paced industry, everyone wants to access data efficiently and quickly. It is quite troublesome to access, review, and update business information without these portals. Web portals allow customers and employees to quickly extract the necessary information to enhance productivity.

How to achieve Custom Web Portal Development?

The development of portal involves designing and developing applications using a specific set of tools. Each web development company has its own project flow. But there are a few general steps that most development companies follow. Here we are covering a universal way of developing portal for businesses.

Web Portal Development Processes

• Requirement Gathering

It is one of the crucial steps in portal development as in this phase, portal development companies understand the client’s requirement for portal. The more clarity developers have, the more the final product will have features and functionality as per the client’s exact requirement. The following information is gathered in this step-
• Understanding the target audience to incorporate the right features in the application.
• Analyze the strengths, weaknesses, and business approaches of competitors
• Defining what tasks, you want to perform using that portal and what objective you want to achieve with the portal.

• Conceptualization & Planning Phase

After requirement gathering, the planning for the development of portal starts by setting up the scope of the work. In this phase, the tech stack is selected to get the required functionality in the portal, and big tasks are divided into small ones. The deadline and budget are set for all the tasks to achieve development within your pre-decided time and budget. Hence during the planning phase, the client learns about the project risk, technology stack, approximate project cost, and development cost.

• Design Phase

In the designing phase, first of all, architecture is prepared for the development team. The architecture is nothing but a site map describing all the pages that will be on your web portal. Besides this, hierarchy and connection between all the pages are defined.
One important thing to keep in mind is during the designing phase, always keep your target audience in mind. It will help you decide the look and feel ( colour selection, icons, and elements for the portal) as per your customers. For example, the employee portal can be less rigid in style, while a partner portal should be simple, organized, and professional.
Once the architecture is decided, then it’s time to start building a prototype for your portal. As a result, you can preview the look of your future web portal. Any changes needed are then incorporated at this stage only. That’s why the design phase is very crucial, and proper time should be given to it.

• Development Phase

Using the prototype created in the previous step web development team starts the coding part to bring your portal to life. First, the home page is developed then developer focuses on the other necessary pages of the portal. The main goal of the development phase is to build a product that looks and feels precisely as per your business requirement. A proficient development team should include a Business Analyst, Software Engineer, developer, designer, Quality Analyst, and Scrum Master. Learn how and from where to hire a dedicated software development team for portal development.

• Testing Phase

This phase is critical as it helps discover all faults and weaknesses of the web portal developed in the previous step. Many portal features like navigation, performance, speed, etc., are thoroughly checked at this phase. The main purpose of testing is to ensure that everything in the web portal works fine and portal should be user-friendly.

• Deployment and Evaluation

After all the errors and bugs reported in the testing phase are fixed, the next step is to deploy the portal. Deployment is real-time running. During this phase, there is continuous monitoring of performance for load balance. Once the web portal is up and running, we will do the real-time performance evaluation. Both evaluation and deployment phases happened in real-time.

• Maintenance

The development team work isn’t complete after deployment. Constant maintenance and period updates are required to keep your portal ahead of competitors.

How Much is the Cost for Web Portal Development?

Now come to the most awaited section, the cost of development. Like websites, portal development costs depend on various factors, including complexity, features, and functionality. Moreover, we can say that cost depends on the specific functionality you want to achieve in your portal. Let’s dive deeper into all the factors affecting the price of portal development.

Factors affecting the cost of web portal development

• The number of features.
• The type of tech stack chosen.
• The kind of mobile experience (PWA, cross-platform app)
• Number and complexity of integration with third-party libraries.
• Number of user roles
• Complexity and uniqueness of portal design
• The complexity of the portal logic
• Required performance and scalability of the portal.
• Needed regulatory compliance.

Other than these factors, the location of the development team also affects the cost. For example, hiring a dedicated development team from India will cost you less compared to hiring from other countries. We break down the cost of portal development for your understanding.

Note*-This is an average cost; it will vary depending on your specific feature requirement in the portal.

Final Word

Web portals can take your business to its deserved heights as they improve customer retention and acquisition and reduce operational costs. With the help of a professional web development company, you can develop a web portal catering to all your business requirements. Customized web portal will reduce your stress of recording and managing data and resources and effectively carry out the business operation.

After reading this blog, we hope you will develop a modern, scalable, and feature-rich web portal for your business. If you are still confused about whether a web portal will solve your business challenges or not, don’t worry; consult with our web portal development team.