Building a custom portal can give your employees, partners, and clients easier access to services hosted on your company’s server. While building a custom portal might sound difficult, it is actually quite simple. As long as you have a basic understanding of how Internet technology works, you can follow the steps to make your business more efficient and secure.

 

  1. Decide What Topics and Services You Want to Cover

 

Your custom portal can include as many sources of information as you want. To make it successful, though, you should choose a few niche areas that will make it easier for users to navigate. If you don’t choose a few topics to concentrate on, then people will likely lose interest in the portal. By tapping into specific interests, though, you can keep them focused on your site’s content.

 

  1. Survey Your Clients and Employees

 

If you are having difficulty deciding exactly what you should include in your web portal, then you should spend some time surveying your clients and employees. This will help you determine what subjects and services are most important to them. With this information, you can find a low-cost way to match their needs without spending money on services that they don’t care about.

 

  1. Focus on Security

 

Your custom portal will most likely ask visitors to sign in so they can access information and services that are useful to them. That means you will need to follow some safety protocol that will prevent hackers from entering the system and stealing private information.

 

Some of the best things you can do include:

  • Using passwords that use a combination of letters, numbers, and special characters
  • Using SSL encryption
  • Signing visitors out after a certain period of inactivity

 

  1. Make Your Site Attractive and Functional

 

Building websites has gotten much easier over the last decade. With so many useful tools, you don’t even need to know much, if any, code to add a portal to your website. Still, you need to make sure that the rest of the site is both attractive and functional.

 

To do this, you should spend time learning the site building tool that you use. You can find ample resources online that will teach you how to use the software or service. No matter what you use, there is a knowledge base that will help make your sites even more useful.