Web development has gone far ahead in the last few years, enabling businesses of all sizes to spend money on innovative platforms such as web portals. Many business managers think of raising their KPIs, but few of them want to spend additional resources on something so complex as a custom web portal. In this article, specialists from Fively software development company helped us consider all the benefits of web portals and possible costs of their development to help you decide whether the game is worth the candle.
What are Web Portals Features?
Web portals provide a solution to many common business problems without direct interference from a business. Standard web portals include a range of features, such as:
- Presentation: a web portal represents your company’s products and services in an appealing and user-friendly way;
- Integration: you can build in numerous third-party solutions, such as payment systems, statistics, reporting, etc., to make your web portal a robust management system;
- Brand loyalty: thanks to numerous subscription models and welcome gifts, you can attract more customers and make them more loyal to your business;
- Collaboration: web portal gives an opportunity to work together with other businesses and create a unique product to broaden your market and attract new customers;
- Belonging to a group: with a web portal customers get personal treatment and a feeling that they are unique and belong to a community at the same time;
- Data safety: all personal and company information stays safe and totally secure at a web portal
Thus, a custom web portal can provide many benefits for businesses, saving time by consolidating several back-end applications into a single point of access. In the next paragraph let’s consider each of the custom web portal benefits in detail.
What Benefits Do You Get?
Here are some of the top advantages that companies can enjoy when they choose a custom web portal development:
1. Streamlined experience and customization
According to Forbes, 34% of customers are eager to buy something online if they see that the content is personalized according to the brand’s vision. In addition to customization, consumers want to get a streamlined experience when scrolling a webpage: according to WebFX, eCommerce companies lose more than $2.6 billion each year due to slow-loading webpages. Custom web portals solve both these problems: they provide customers with a personalized user experience and use high-end plugins. The last ones highly increase the speed and the functionality of the web portal, as well as the overall success of a business.
2. Get the needed info faster
Every effective company should have fast access to structured data on its operations in different fields: market analysis, financial reports, sales, and customer service notices. But many employees still spend hours a week trying to find and update the needed info, experiencing frustration and improper waste of resources. Custom web portals can become a single point of truth for both employees and customers, helping to find the information quickly and easily, saving tons of hours, and increasing workers’ retention rate.
3. Better in-group communication
It’s extremely important to keep all the employees in the company on the same page to minimize errors, misunderstandings, and improper operational activity. Web portals help to share vital information among the company employees, creating a place for easy and effective in-group communication. They can also be used by managers to notify about upcoming appointments, post and share ideas on discussion boards, recognize top performers, and unite people from different departments around the common goal or current project.
4. No more switching between apps
One of the biggest issues experienced by employees when communicating with customers is that they have to switch between different applications to answer them. It’s quite an exhausting and time-consuming experience, which leads to manual errors and extra work to fix them. A custom web portal can solve this problem by becoming a single point of data management and eliminating the need to switch between apps.
5. Easy personnel hiring and training
Finding and training new employees, as well as onboarding and training procedures require lots of time, money, and resources. In most cases, it also involves using many different applications, each with its own terminology and interface. Web portal development helps businesses improve all these processes via a single point of information management, where no specialized IT skills are required.
6. Better security with more versatility options
The safety of a business’ and customers’ information is the main concern for any company. Due to authentication procedures and different administrative roles, web portals offer a high level of security for a company’s data repositories. What’s more, web portals can be accessed not only through desktops but also through laptops, tablets, and smartphones with the same level of security across all devices.
What is the Price?
Every web portal should be customized to the unique needs of the company. Thus, the cost of building a custom web portal depends on a number of factors: the chosen web portal type and its features, the content that the business requires on it, the qualification and the size of the software team, and the desired timeline for the project. Depending on all the listed factors, the average cost for web development can start at $4000: this is an approximate estimation for a portal with some basic features and design. This figure will be higher if you decide to include some special custom features, elements, and components to the portal, or if you choose a super high-skilled software team for its development. In other words, the more functions are added, the higher will be the final cost of the project.
Apart from these factors, you should also include the cost of domain name and hosting. This figure can vary from $5 to $1000 per month, and the cost of your custom design can approximately start from $500. As a result, if we collect all these factors together, the final web portal cost can approximately range from $6.000 up to $70.000, and even more, if the portal has a highly complex architecture and a unique design.
Quality is Everything
Every company chooses its own portal type and decides on the features depending on the needed functionality and content. Still, business managers should always remember that a web portal they build will represent the whole company with its spirit, vision, products, and the idea behind them. That’s why your custom web portal should really be of high quality to benefit your business and attract new customers, and not vice versa. It is extremely important to choose a web development company that not only fits the specified budget but also has the experience and skills necessary to build a catching, user-friendly, secure, scalable, and highly functional web portal.
