We have been seeing a rapid shift to online platforms in recent times. Businesses and their customers both have been benefiting from this shift in multiple ways. One way to move your business operations online is to invest in custom web portal development.
In this article, we will talk about what a web portal is and how your business can gain certain advantages from portal development.
What Is a Web Portal?
Running a business means managing a lot of operations on a day to day basis as well as taking critical decisions in the long run. To manage your operations in a more efficient and organised manner, you can hire a portal development company to create a platform for you where you can access all your data quickly and efficiently. This unified platform is called a web portal.
There are many kinds of web portals that different types of businesses can benefit from. Here are some examples:
- Patient portals
- Employee portals
- CRM portals
- Sales portals
- HRM portals
The main goal of portal development is to provide the users with a safe and secure platform that is also accessible and efficient. Thus, most web portals are built with certain role-based limitations in check. The system unifies the business’s operations but at the same time keeps the various sub-systems separate from each other so that sensitive data from one area does not leak into another area. With web portal development services, a business can choose to design the structure of the system according to their unique business needs.
There are a few features and functionalities that are typically offered as part of portal development services, such as task management tools, communication and collaboration tools, data analytics, and reporting mechanisms. If you want a custom web portal development job done, you can add more specialised functions, such as business intelligence, financial transaction support, content management systems, third-party integrations, and customised dashboards for different end-users.
Why Web Portal Development Can Be Advantageous for Your Business
There are several reasons why it could be a great idea for your business to go for custom portal development. Let’s talk about the top three benefits your business can gain from web portal development.
A Single Consolidated Solution
As we discussed in the previous section, where we introduced you to web portals, the main purpose of a web portal is to unify your business functions.
Traditional business apps are often seen to be extremely chaotic. They tend to have no mechanism in place for the organisation of the large amounts of data that these systems often generate or deal with. Using a multitude of business apps can cause your information to be scattered across multiple data stores. Interdepartmental communication can also become a hassle due to this, causing unnecessary delays.
With a centralised system, you can consolidate all your data and operations in one place, within the same system. Any updates to your business can be made quickly and efficiently without wasting time or resources. No matter where you are or what time it is, the system is always accessible, 24×7.
You can even have your portal development company build this platform in accordance with the current apps you use so that your employees do not have a hard time transitioning from the old system to the newer, updated system. Your web portal can also be integrated with the other apps if that would be more efficient for the business and its employees. Your web portal is also capable of handling the consumer side of things. It all depends on what level of consolidation you want to see between your various business functions or departments.
As far as security is concerned, most web portals are designed such that there is a role-based access provision system for the users. For example, if you want only managers to be able to see employees’ progress reports, you can ask your developer to make performance reports accessible to only those users who log in with a ‘manager’ role.
Custom portal development companies usually also offer multi-device support to businesses. This means you do not necessarily need to be logged into your office computer to run this app. The web portal can be used on your employees’ personal smartphones or home desktops too (depending on the kind of access permissions you are willing to grant them).
Quick Training
When an organisation has multiple business applications running side by side, there can often be times when it is extremely difficult to teach all the employees how to run these separate systems. It could take a long time for them to be able to perfectly use each system. This would waste a lot of their precious time that they could have used to achieve other, more important goals. On top of that, it would also be a waste of the organisation’s time and thus directly hurt the business.
With custom portal development, you can get one system built for all the users – the best way to go would be to build a system that is close to what employees are most familiar and comfortable with (in terms of user interface and user experience) – and have the developers train them at the same time.
Always Up-to-Date
The consolidation of multiple apps into one single portal development project gives you the advantage of combining any number of data stores into one. This means you can now have all of your business’s data, a lot of which may be overlapping or interrelated, in one place.
Combining redundant databases can lead to more efficient organisation of information in that there are almost no chances of the repetition or inconsistency that you may have had with multiple data stores. If you have some data that needs to be entered in both HR and Finance databases, you can simply enter it once to make it part of your new system. Access to that data can then be granted to both departments. If you need to make any changes to existing data in the HR database, you can now do so in the new central database without having to worry that Finance may receive outdated data. This also eliminates the need for multiple manual entries in two different systems.
