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Web portals can be a fantastic tool to help your organization connect through relevant functionality and content. In this article, we break down what a web portal is, go through some web portal examples, and discuss why using a web portal may be right for you! Read on to find out what some of the most popular types of web portals are and how they can impact your business needs.
What is a Web Portal?
So, what exactly is a web portal? A web portal is a consolidated online platform that helps you reach a niche group of users. Web portals are accessed through a web browser, and they make calls to a database for information to complete user requests.
But what makes a web portal different from a website? Websites are often made with a large variety of users in mind and are made to retain the greatest number of prospective customers. Portals are made with collaboration and user interaction in mind!
How to Use Web Portal
There are many ways to maximize a web portal’s functionality for your organization’s needs. First, let’s look at some external and internal benefits:
External Benefits
There are three main external benefits of web portals: Control access, marketing, and customer service:
- Control access: Anyone can visit and see the content of a website. Web portals allow for secure access to information by only allowing entry through the portal.
- Marketing: Being able to combine information about your users with their behavior makes web portals a great way to customize user experiences. You can use personalized data from the portal to help drive marketing initiatives and better manage them via the portal’s back-end system.
- Customer Service: Giving users access to personally identifiable information through a secure and easy to use platform like a web portal can help streamline customer service. This leads to happier customers and better customer-facing operations.
Internal Benefits
We can also look at the internal benefits to using a web portal over a website:
- Personalization: By using both the biographical information you get with a user profile and the users’ behavior while visiting the site, you can personalize each user’s experience! Personalization can come in the form of personal portal calendars, dashboards, and even what information each user can access via their login.
- Organization: Portals allow companies to better organize internal systems and the back end of their customer facing applications.
Web Portal Examples
Let’s look at some web portal examples and see how having an online platform can help support various businesses!
Patient Portal
Patient portals serve as a resource for both patients and providers. Through a free patient portal, patients can request refills for medications, print immunization records, and even schedule appointments with connected clinics!
On the provider side, doctors and other health professionals can communicate directly with patients using the patient portal. Clinics can also upload test results and after visit documentation to give patients easy access. Using patient portals also provides security when dealing with protected health information—a must have for any medical practice!
Government Portal
Government portals can be an important tool to manage the relationship between citizens, private businesses, and the government. A common example is parking tickets! People can use a web portal to look up their citations and easily contest or pay them.
A great example of a fully functional government portal is Grants.gov—built for citizens to find information about federal grants and manage grant funds online. Having all of this information consolidated into one easy-to-navigate system makes it easier for people to find what they need!
Insurance Portal
Insurance portals are a great way for insurance providers and their clients to connect digitally! Using a web portal, policy holders can track plan information and who’s covered by their policy.
Additionally, letting new and existing clients get policy quotes online helps free up other company resources, saving everyone time! A web portal also makes it a lot easier to maintain and even scale up, depending on the size of your customer base.
Banking and Financial Portal
Using a web portal for financial transactions is a great way to up your application’s security! A banking web portal can be used to keep track of all of your accounts in one place, and it makes connecting with your financial institution a breeze.
Customers can trust a more secure platform to view private dashboards detailing spending, saving, and various financial goals. Banks can also use their customer web portals as a way to directly and securely message customers and enable both parties to keep track of those conversations. This can be anything from customer support to getting live updates on interest rates for prospective loans!
Intranet and Employee Portal
So far, we’ve looked at a lot of external facing portal examples, but how can using a portal help a company internally? The two most common internal uses for a web portal are intranet portals and employee portals.
Intranet
Do you have a lot of documents you need to share with your team? Maybe some training manuals, project documentation, or even a shared calendar? Internal doc management tools can give your team easy, seamless access to all of these! Think of your company’s intranet as an exclusive online resource for employees.
Intranets can also be used to help facilitate professional development by providing users access to a variety of training materials and even tailoring user experience by controlling what videos and materials a user has access to.
Employee portal
You may be thinking “How would an employee portal differ from an intranet?” Employee portals are geared more towards the human resources aspect of your business. HR can easily access and update employee information and deliver updates to a wide variety of employees.
Vendor Portal
Another great internal example is a vendor portal. Vendor portals serve as a landing point for suppliers, procurement, and sellers. The collaborative nature means you can reduce redundancies in workflow.
A company that uses a variety of vendors would benefit from being able to keep all of their shared resources in one, easy accessible place. Companies can easily onboard new vendors and track their spending on a single user interface! Once you’ve got your vendor portals set up, they are a great resource to streamline communication, freeing up time and resources.
Importance of Web Portals
Now that we’ve looked at some web portal examples, you may be wondering how they can apply to your business needs. Using a web portal can help support your digital presence.
Being able to tailor your portal based on usage and business needs enhances your users’ experiences. As we all know, making sure your products utilize a user-centric design results in happier users and better productivity!
Why You Should Use Web Portals
There are many great reasons you might use web portals to fulfill your business needs:
- Refine website functionality: Making sure you’re reaching the right audience is much easier when you can tailor every user’s experience. Catering to specific needs is a great reason to use a portal over a website!
- Improve collaboration: Web portals are a great way to create collaborative platform communities between users. From file sharing to messaging abilities, web portals encourage a collaborative, flexible environment!
- Enhance security features: By requiring portal login credentials, web portals can support more robust security features than a website can. Other examples of good security measures to implement with a web portal are data encryption and multi-factor authentication.
Learn More with Geneca
After learning how flexible web portals can be, you may be thinking it’s time to develop one for your organization’s needs. If you’re looking for help designing and building a web portal, contact Geneca today! For over 20 years, Geneca has worked with a variety of businesses to find solutions that work best for their needs.
Here at Geneca, we take great pride in understanding the business and software sides of your project. Our development and leadership teams can make the web portal development process easy to navigate. Let us use our experience to offer you the advice and tools to make your custom web portal a reality!
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