Have you ever wondered “what is a portal?” We have already explained in detail the importance of websites in today’s virtual community. But in this article, we are going to tell you about web portals. Now you may ask yourself: What is a portal? Is the portal different from the website? What does the portal have to do with your business? In this article, we will tell you what a portal is and we will get acquainted with its important types and factors.
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What is a portal?
A web portal is a collection of information from various sources. These resources may be websites, search engines, online forums, and so on. In portal design, the data of these resources are collected uniformly and symmetrically on the web and presented to users.
Most web portals provide users across the web with the information they need. Therefore, this leads to another definition of web design. A portal is an online website where individuals or forums find the information and questions they are looking for. A web portal and a website are similar in several ways, but there are also differences that distinguish them.
By 2020, being online has become essential to staying competitive. For example, about 90% of customers expect a particular brand to include an online store site design for customers or a corporate website design. A modern web portal can be considered a special website or “a highly visited website with a wide range of content, services and sales links“.
A portal has a single web interface that provides access to a variety of data and services, web portals with responsive web design capabilities as well as sophisticated and interactive capabilities for a variety of industries (e.g. e-commerce, store building, mass media, banking , Education) and a variety of communities are used.
Concepts related to website builders and ordinary websites such as website optimization and SEO can also be applied to them.
The difference between a portal and a website
It is better to first explain what a website is and then we will be able to easily understand the difference between a website and a web portal. A website is a collection of web pages that are placed on the Internet and can be accessed by anyone. A web portal, on the other hand, is a collection of information gathered through various sources.
For example, users usually need to log in to a web portal. Also, web portals and websites fall into different categories. Websites can be personal, government, blogging, or social networking sites, while web portals are generally categorized vertically and horizontally.
Since we deal with all kinds of websites on a daily basis, we will describe the types of portals in the following.
Types of portals
In general, the division of portals can be considered as follows.
Client Portals
Customer portal is software that enables secure interaction between specific parties. Historically, client portals have been used as a tool for organizations to allow certain individuals, often client organizations or partners, to access documents for viewing or downloading through a one-way communication channel, sometimes called FTP or VDR. These one-way channels ensure that both parties have access to certain documents. However, technology and the customer are evolving with organizational needs. These one-way channels ensure that both parties have access to certain documents. However, technology and the customer are evolving with organizational needs.
Staff Portals or Intranets
An intranet portal is used to access external applications or organizational information and helps organizations to easily manage data, applications, and information through specific methods. In fact, the intranet provides a centralized knowledge base that all employees can access with the goal of creating a better connected work environment.
Vertical Portals
A vertical portal (also known as a “Vortal”) is a specialized entry point into a specific market, industry, domain, or topic. Some vertical portals are known as “Virtual Information Portals (VIP)“.
On the Web, a vertical portal is a website that provides a portal to industry-specific information such as healthcare, insurance, automobiles, or food production.
Horizontal Portals
A horizontal portal is used as a platform for several companies in the same business sector or the same manufacturers or distributors. (Vertical industry is an industry that focuses on a relatively small range of goods and services, while horizontal industry is an industry that aims to produce a wide range of goods and services)
Sales Portal
Simply put, a sales portal is a central digital resource that stores and provides information, tools, and assets to assist sellers in transactions.
Project Management Portal
The project management portal system allows your team to track all projects, share documents, and create tasks for other team members. Also, by observing the progress of projects in the portal, internal users can provide more feedback to create higher quality.
Customer Portal Solution
One of the main features of the customer portal is that it allows customers to find solutions to their problems at any time. Through the customer portal, customers can register support items, receive file updates, search the knowledge base, and use online forums to post ideas and receive feedback.
Membership portal
A membership portal is a website designed for members of an organization to easily access important information. In fact, a membership portal refers to a website that a company, like insurance companies, creates to give members access to their account information.
CRM Portal
The CRM portal is part of the CRM system. That means small sections created just for the access of your customers and partners. This is usually done by creating a web page that interacts with parts of your CRM system that you want customers and partners to access.
Human Resources Portal
Human Resources Portal is an internal portal for a company’s employees that is used to access information about human resources and other information related to their workplace. HR portals can also help HR staff communicate with employees (and vice versa) as well as reduce the number of calls and emails between the two.
Intranet portal
An intranet portal is a portal that integrates access to information and enterprise applications in an intranet. An intranet portal is a tool that helps a company easily manage their data, applications and information by displaying personal views.
Extranet Portal
These days, whenever we talk about building corporate networks, extranet comes up, which is a bit of an old term. As intranet refers to “inside“, extranet means “outside” based on the Latin word extra.
Extranets typically operate through web / client portals, and are external, robust, collaborative, and virtual network systems that provide access to specific resources and data on a company’s internal network (intranet) to third parties.
Corporate Portal
The corporate portal, or sometimes known as the Enterprise Information Portal (or Enterprise Portal), is a web-based internal network that is very similar to an intranet for the efficient provision and dissemination of information and services to corporate employees.
Advantages of web portals
Having a web portal for your business and profession has various key roles in increasing online sales, managing customer queries and publishing valuable data, as well as a variety of other services.
In the following, we will describe the most important benefits of having a web portal.
Improve user interaction
With increasing engagement on social media, businesses now have the opportunity to easily interact with their customers by answering countless questions. Also, it is well known that the customer becomes more aware of your business and services or products. Also, portals are the best and most efficient way to educate your customers apart from running a smart marketing plan.
Increasing awareness
Implementing business-to-business and customer-to-customer models plays a key role in creating overall awareness and thus increasing business profits. On the other hand, today, the Internet has become one of the most widely used systems in which anyone can easily communicate with the customer, and even among the types of competition, Internet competition is a much more effective way. Hence, companies develop and strengthen their marketing policies to raise users’ awareness of their services and products.
Support for various portlets
Today, there are many portlets available for web portals that allow you to create a wide range of capabilities to comply with business terms and conditions. However, these portals are usually a very fast way to increase efficiency and create the best web portal development.
Provide flexible and user-friendly ports
Because so many people today are looking to create professional web portals to create multiple resources with very simple access, most web portals are often designed with incredibly beautiful and simple templates and are very user friendly.