Portal Development – Types and Applications of Portals

What is Portal Development? How did the concept evolve?

Sometimes big businesses and enterprises think of more than one website representing their business or organization’s different facets. This kind of demand leads the web development industry to develop a concept like portal development. Developers have accumulated different websites for their products or services as a single entity and called it the web portal. The article highlights different aspects of web development and its versatility to cover aspects of all industries.

Benefits of Web Portals for your business

Thereby, a portal provides its users with a range of information arranged in an efficient way that is perfect for users to access different information through a single window. A portal is an excellent choice for businesses that presents data from various sources in a combined manner.

However, all types of businesses and organizations can adopt portal development as per their business requirements and get lots of benefits. Many portal development companies offer end-to-end solutions at affordable rates; small and large enterprises can select the best according to their business needs.

• Global influence: Through an internet portal, anyone can access your information and content globally with minimal investment.
• Personalization Approach:You can serve your visitors with targeted offers based on the historical buyer data and location.
• High Conversion: Comparative to other engagement channels, the portal leverages a seamless experience for your user with a click away.
• Significant Result: Whether its internet or intranet portal allows multiple activities like business processes, integrated support, or effective business campaign.
• Cost-Effective: The portal is a much more cost-saving approach than traditional media to achieve strategic and practical business goals.

Let’s have a look at different types of portal development for the internet & intranet applications. We will see the main categories first, then sub-categories.

Web Portals Classification

Web portals are classified as horizontal or vertical. A horizontal outlet is a web platform to serve the same type of company and domain, while the vertical portal is a web platform to perform a specialized industry niche.

a. Vertical Portals

When it comes to talking about vertical portals, these are such types of outlets that mainly focus on a particular domain and industry. Vertical portals offer information, statistics, tolls, articles, and more on a specific sector. Through these portals, businesses will get an ideal gateway for their business to market their products and services. However, this category portal has different types of outlets under its category.

Here, vertical means the portal takes its users into the business’s depth and topples everything on it. Therefore, the consumer of vertical portals is that business niche-specific audience, including experts and professionals in that industry—for instance, B2B eCommerce portal.

b. Horizontal Portals

Here horizontal means expanding its horizons by containing various content useful and related to a wide range of readers. For example, customers, retailers, and wholesalers are equally consuming e-commerce portals. Therefore, horizontal portals are one type of portals that mainly focus on different interests and topics. The main aim of these portals is to present something helpful for other people. Being an entry point, these portals provide information and content on various topics of interest and guide an accurate direction to obtain resources and information.

6 Types of Web Portals with Real-Time Examples

With this clarification of the portal concept, let’s take a tour of the portal’s sub-categories, either belonging to vertical or horizontal types of categories.

1. Corporate Portal Development

The corporate portal is an excellent portal for companies and organizations looking to manage their colossal information. This type of portal offers a consolidated view of company information and access to customized and personalized selected data. Big companies can get portal development services and gain numerous benefits. Different types of corporate portals exist on the web. Below are some excellent examples for corporate portal development but not limited to:

• Customer Portal 

It is a dedicated customer-centric portal that facilitates users to get comfortable customer support and further raises complaints, feedback, and engagement with corporate products and services.

• Vendor Portal 

This type of portals helps and accomplishes various vendor activities like vendor registration with corporate, tendering, bidding and auction, and live reverse auction participation.

• Partner Portal 

This is a private type of portal useful for business partners or partner companies for a giant organization and industries like healthcare, supply chain, CPGApple, and Microsoft.

2. Business Process & Collaborative Portal:

Intranet Portal solutions began to offer internal business process and workflow management, business rules automation, business process approval, collaboration for inter-department, and branch. It allows internal and external access to use such business data and functions securely. Collaborative portals also offer internal information, tools, applications, and access points through a single point. Following are the best examples of business process automation portal and joint portal development:

• Intranet Portal

Intranet Portal lets you collaborate with anyone – to inter teams or departments, to clients, or vendors to accomplish tasks for approvals process, and intercommunication from the secured and collaborative workspace.

• Document Process Automation

It helps in business collaboration for a documented process to organize repetitive activities on the document to automatically edit, view, comment, and version control.

• Business Process Workflow

If you want to automate your business process; a business process portal can help you enable workflow processes that transform information and process business automation.

• Procurement Approval Portal

Procurement Approval Portal sets business rule automation and workflow of pre-defined and repetitive tasks in a procure-to-purchase order process and handles the data and document transformation.

3. Education Portal Development

Universities, schools, and colleges mainly use the education category of portals to provide their students with accurate information that is necessary for them. Education portals give the latest updates about new courses, exams, and information on a particular topic that is useful for the students who have missed the class. This way, universities, and schools can get a perfect education portal and get lots of features. Some of the best examples are:

• E-Learning Portal

Under the looming threat of COVID-19, e-learning portals have played a significant role in education and corporate training online as a gateway of courses, resources, videos, and presentations.

• Exam Portal

Education boards for schools and universities are taking exam portals dedicated to all activities related to certifications and examinations, web software for the online exam, access, and review.

• Student Portal

Every college and university now needs a modern Student Portal dedicated to students for various educational and peripheral activities based on web content management software.

4. Information Publishing Portal

Dictionaries and various Wiki sites are information publishing portals that provide in-depth information or knowledge on a particular keyword or topic that you hardly find on other websites. Modern portal strategies based on web content management software offer better user experiences, web-friendly integration with back-office management and legacy systems to support more user engagement.

• Knowledge Base Portal

Knowledgebase web portal is simply a website for content consumers, with an advanced search engine and responsive for reading on any device. You can instantly create beautiful content and publish an online self-Service knowledge Base.

• CMS Portal

A content management system (CMS) is a website that creates and manages digital content. Advance information publishing CMS helps the content publisher facilitate collaborative authoring for websites.

• Media portal

News Portal is the publish essential information on regular updates with creative design and powerful features that allow you to quickly and easily create and broadcast live news contents.

5. HR & Talent Management Portal

It is specified to the human resources management process to fully accommodate recruitment, training, talent management, and employee performance management. Human Resource Portal is vital to managing a successful HR operation with talent acquisition to automate workflow processes and enable other crucial activities for placement to payroll process seamlessly.

• Recruitment and Job Portal

Recruitment and JobBoard Portal helps in small to large scale recruitment processes for companies and organizations for hiring the best talent from the industry by streamlining salient features of application tracking, interviewing, and employee assessment.

• Application Tracking Portals

Applicant Tracking portal manages your entire hiring and recruitment process and makes the hiring process quick and easy. This Portals to facilitate the screening, resume parsing, and keep tracking of the talent pipeline.

• Onboarding Portal

From background checks to quickly ramp up employees on the job. An organization-specific onboarding portal reduces paperwork and helps new employees access, self-register, and complete the onboarding process online.

• Employee Training Portal

Enterprises and corporates need to offer training continually to their different levels of staff and departments. They need to make a next-level training portal to endow the knowledge and experience necessary to serve with advanced skills.

6. E-commerce Portal

SMBs find an eCommerce site sufficient to do online business with. However, big companies and enterprises seek an eCommerce portal to encompass their wide range of products and relevant services. This type of eCommerce portal supports business to business and business to consumer e-Commerce deals, so e-Commerce companies can opt for such kinds of outlets to gain lots of features and advantages. Some peculiar examples of a sub-category of commerce portals are:

• B2B / B2C Portal

Wholesalers require business-to-business (B2B) portals to deal with retailers. Many eCommerce stores are dealing directly with customers, so they are looking for B2C or business-to-customer types of websites.

• Online Marketplace

It creates a virtual marketplace for different but relevant vendors. Here, you can find all types of customers-like B2B and B2C customers as end-users.

• Auction and Bidding Portal

An online bidding portal is a vital step in expanding any manufacturing, supply chain, or retail business. This portal helps you offer online auctions, reverse auctions, or real-time bidding of material procurement.

• Sales Portal

When your sales staff is global and needs a platform to trace and analyze sales-related activities, sales portals help improve, giving your sales representative and sales partner all the information they need to refine the sales process.

• Inventory Portal

Inventory management for manufacturers and sellers becomes strenuous when carried on a large scale and in different locations. An Inventory portal helps in due course to organize goods, products, and raw materials most efficiently.

Conclusion

Many other horizontal portals include enterprise portal, intranet portal, and many more. No matter what type of portal you will adopt for your business, make sure to hire a professional portal developer who generates quality portals to suffice your needs.

Perception System is a specialized Portal Development Company, serving end-to-end web portal development solutions to its worldwide customers. The company offers all types of portal development services to hire a portal developer or expert team for your business custom requirements.