1. What Is a Web Portal?

2 What are The Most Popular Types of Web Portals? 

     2.1 Customer Portal 

     2.2 Vendor Portal 

     2.3 Patient Portal 

     2.4 Business Processes Portals (Intranet/Extranet)

     2.5 Government Portal 

     2.6 Educational Portal

     2.7 HR Web Portal 

3. What Are The Business Benefits of Custom Web Portal Development?

4. 6 Tips for Successful B2B Web Portal Development

What Is a Web Portal? 

A web portal is a digital platform that gives users single access to information, collected from different sources, in a secure, personalized way. To make it simpler, when you need to check the status of your online shopping order, you log in to the “eCommerce web portal” and get personalized information about your order status from the linked database. This is what a web portal looks like and does.

Web portals always bring to mind an image of an old legacy interface, however, this is an outdated perspective because we nearly use web portals every day in our life now. According to Kickstand publishing, an internet user in the US visits over 135 web pages per day varying between all types of portals and websites.

What are The Most Popular Types of Web Portals?

Customer Portal

Customer portals are one of the top-used web portals, because what’s more important in any business than customers? They are usually built with an intuitive and attractive user interface, and their purpose is to store all the users’ personalized updated information in their accounts. 

Customers use such portals so they can check their shopping history, show order summaries, pay online, track orders, or review personal information and promotions.

Vendor Portal

Vendor portals are the pathway of companies to automate and manage third-party suppliers’ operations. Building vendor web portals help businesses that deal with numerous suppliers to streamline their operations and simplify trading processes. 

It also detangles interlaced communications and improves the overall procurement and documentation lifecycle. Suppliers usually register to vendor ecommerce portals to maximize their selling possibilities and provide enhanced online client experiences.

Patient Portal

Patient portals are used as a secured online database for the medical history and all healthcare activities of users. Patients log into these portals and can find all the history of medications, allergies, doctor visits, lab results, immunizations, and any other medical info. 

It also provides easier end-to-end secured communication between the patient and the doctor to book an appointment, request prescriptions, check healthcare insurance coverage, and more. It’s the recent most important platform in every healthcare institute and has become in higher demand, especially during the pandemic time.

Business Processes Portals (Intranet/Extranet)

Business process portals are built with the objective to enhance the operational efficiency of an organization. This kind of portal is classified into two categories, intranet and extranet.

The intranet is built for internal users only and is used to share training materials, sensitive information, company technology tools, or any other. 

On the other hand, the extranet is built to allow access for external users such as partners or suppliers to share data such as services and user guides or any non-sensitive piece of information. Both intranet and extranet contribute to enhancing the team’s productivity and improving businesses’ interoperability. 

Government Portal

Government portals are the first step in governments’ digital transformation journeys all over the world nowadays. This type of portal provides online self-services where users can log in with national personal information and get access to multiple services. These services can either to conduct business and financial transactions, apply for licenses, get access to payment gateways to pay bills or tickets, or even book any government events. 

Government portals are built to provide maximum security for citizens’ information and with engaging interfaces to motivate more citizen interactions.

Educational Portal

E-Learning portals are built for the purpose of providing an online learning experience. This applies to universities, schools, training centers, or business and governmental organizations. 

Educational portals vary between E-learning Portals, exam portals, student portals, and staff portals. Each one of them serves a specific scope of educational activity but they all operate for one objective of delivering enhanced and innovative online learning experiences for all their users. 

HR Web Portal

The human resources portal is the organization’s gateway to manage and store all employees’ related operations and activities. It stores all employees’ needed information such as handbooks and guides, as well as all the worker’s documentation and legalities. In addition, these portals are also usually designed to give access to non-employees and allow job applicants to apply for vacancies. 

HR portals is a flexible sort of portals that are built according to each business’s specific needs. It reduces costs, supports environmental initiatives to minimize paper documents, and optimizes the full cycle of HR operations.

What are The Business Benefits of Custom Web Portal Development?

Web portal development reflects numerous benefits on your operational workflow and that’s why businesses are more directed toward building their own custom web portals now. Below are some of the perks you’ll get from building your own portal.

1. Unique Features Tailored To Your Needs

Every business or organization has its own specific needs and objectives they want to achieve from building a digital platform. Developing a web portal gives you the freedom to build a customized platform without any limitations and enables you to build a functional portal that pushes your business forward.

2. Enhanced Scalability & Agility

If you’re seeking to build a digital platform that grows as you grow, it’s definitely a custom web portal because it’s built to be flexible and agile to keep pace with your evolving needs. 

As your business scales up, your data, your customers’ database, your orders, and every minor process start to double relentlessly, and custom web portal development can flex and scale as you scale.

3. Effective Communication at The Workplace

Developing a web portal guarantees to provide smooth communication between team members and stakeholders and ensures that everyone is on the same page. 

Web portals can include features to enhance communication using discussion boards and business operations and features to boost competitiveness such as leaderboards. This contributes to maximizing productivity, streamlining smoother operations, and minimizing laybacks and dropoffs.

4. Optimized User Experience

Improved customer journey is one of the most valuable benefits of web portals. The web portal design process starts with tailoring the customer journey in your portal from start to end where you can decide how to make it engaging, where to place CTAs, and how to trigger customer conversion and reduce bounce rate. 

5. Centralized Data Security

Web portal development services tie multiple security steps and processes to guarantee building a secured and fortified portal against outsiders and malware attacks. Using the typical website builders and themes makes your platform weaker and more exposed to vulnerables and security risks. 

However, when building your own custom web portal, you build with SSL security technology, with advanced coding, and it will be hosted in a more secure environment to protect your customers’ data.

6 Tips for Successful B2B Web Portal Development

According to digital commerce 360 market report, online sales on B2B e-commerce sites, log-in portals, and marketplaces reached $1.63 Trillion! In order to join this huge investment sector, there are simple aspects you need to consider before starting.

First, you have to face the fact that in B2B, the buyer part of the equation is also a customer that you have to focus on satisfying their needs and keeping their retention rates high. 

Second, the B2B sector is very challenging when it comes to finding the target audience, you have to be more specific and adapt your web portal to meet your niche demands. You also have to provide a user-friendly experience in order to reach interested audiences easier and faster. 

So, if your decision is to join this marathon, you must be ready to compete and win. Find below our supportive 6 winning tips for building a successful B2B portal.

1. Provide omnichannel experience in trading and after-sales support.

2. Implement flexible payment methods that suit everyone.

3. Deliver personalized experience depending on users’ scenarios and case studies. 

4. Consider mobile optimization for the portal from the early design and development phases.

5. Utilize the latest tech stack such as chatbots, AI, IoT, and cloud computing.

6. Perform Search Engine Optimization SEO with industry-specific terminologies. 

Finally, Web portal development is a key step in building your brand’s existence and in managing successful business operations. We wish this article has detangled and clarified everything related to web portal development. Now it’s your move. Add value to your end users by building your portal and get started with a trusted, experienced, and innovative software solutions provider like asgatech.