Portal Website Design
A web portal is a unified online platform with many different user services. Internet portal usually looks like a homepage with dozens of widgets and links to news resources. Considering the abundance of features, building a web portal can be challenging even for experienced developers.
Tips for Making a Portal Website
- Data presentation. Web platforms have a lot of sections and pages. It could lead to a clutter of blocks. So you need to design a clear interface and navigation. We advise working through these moments at the prototyping stage.
- Let people chat. Comments are great. But don’t forget to moderate them carefully. Let users sign in with their social media account to reduce the number of spammers. You can set up a general chat and interest forums. Let people express their thoughts.
- Navigation menu. To ensure that it’s easy to navigate through multiple sections and pages, we design a website map and navigation menu as early as the prototyping stage.
- Mobile version. More and more people browse the web from their mobile devices every year. So it’s a good practice to develop a mobile version or a mobile-first design.
- Statistical tools. Such functionality allows admins to collect accurate data about how many users visited the website, when and on what pages they were most active, etc.
Ads are the main profit source. We recommend building a dedicated advertising module for this purpose. This tool will allow you to flexibly customize ad impressions. You can choose sections, pages, and topics, set up frequency and number of impressions, and display time.
Web portal types
News
News portals are updated daily with new articles, links, and other fresh content. To ensure that this content reaches users on time, developers often use CDNs.
Local
This type of portal is dedicated to a particular region. In fact, the local portal collects all of the information about the city: posters, news, organizations, directory, ads, etc.
Educational
This type of portal contains enormous amounts of data, both from third-party resources and from internal databases. Educational portals must be able to work under the high load of thousands of simultaneous visits. They also should have an advanced search.
Government
Official websites are one of the most visited types of portals. Therefore, when developing a backend, we often use several servers at once. Such web resources often contain news, useful information for citizens, and application forms.
Enterprise B2B portals
Building a corporate portal implies providing company employees with access to corporate data. Enterprise portals are highly customizable. They also contain all the necessary collaboration tools: chat rooms, file sharing, etc.
Custom
With developing custom portals, we use an individual approach for every project. Custom web portals tailored to the needs of your business. We can add any kind of module and functionality to your application.
Technical nuances of building a portal
Administrator panel
Usually, building a website includes developing an administrative panel. It has the separation of roles, support for receiving notifications, and additional features to speed up the manager’s work, such as frequently used block templates, multifunctional visual editors, etc.
High traffic
We design your web resource taking into account the expected traffic since it is very easy to lose an audience in this niche. Advice to build a high traffic website: Design a proper architecture with scalability and future workloads in mind; Use robust search engines such as Elasticsearch or Sphinx; Never skip the load testing stage of project delivery; Use autoscaling servers (AWS, Microsoft Azure, Digital Ocean, etc.).
Content distribution
For steady traffic growth, it’s essential to implement the daily updates functionality. Use RSS feeds, email newsletters, reposting content to social media, browser notifications, etc.
The center of psychologists "Mirsemi"
The author’s psychological center, which provides psychological support to those who find themselves in a difficult life situation. Psychologists are ready to help normalize the relationship with relatives and others, understand yourself and your desires, learn how to cope with stress and other psychological problems
In this project, we focused on creating a website with a logical and intuitive structure, developing psychological support programs and webinar entries.
Linglobo - online portal for learning foreign languages online
In this project, we have developed a functional website with a personal account of teachers and students. We have enabled acquiring with different payment methods for a subscription or an hourly lesson with a selected teacher. We have developed flashcards describing teachers and their knowledge and watching videos.
How to choose the right tech?
Building from scratch
If you’re going to build a website with advanced features, this is the way to go. When using a framework, you’re absolutely free to choose any functionality. Flexible admin panel settings will help to improve and simplify the work of your administrator. Also, the custom approach allows ensuring better security. The downside of building bespoke websites is the higher cost. Sometimes it is a few times higher compared to off-the-shelf solutions because developers make every component from scratch. We at Team500 use Python programming language and its framework Django.
Using ready-made CMS
It’s a great option for small to medium traffic local and news portals. On the plus side, having lots of turnkey modules makes development much easier. We use WordPress, the most popular CMS in the world. Almost a third of all websites in the world are built on it. WordPress was originally designed as a blogging platform. So if your product is aimed at posting lots of news and articles, WP is a good choice. The minus of CMSs is limited functionality. E.g., it’s hard to implement a user account feature. And it’s almost impossible to do a full-featured chat. Plus, it’s hard to optimize and handle load using off-the-shelf platforms. So if you expect to have high traffic, you’d be better off with a custom approach
Technologies
