Community Portal Development – Benefits and Best Practices

Community Portal Development – An Overview

In this beautiful world there are many peoples are with the shared interests. Same people we found in company or organization. Connecting people with shared interests is preferable to create win-win situation for both person and company, business or organization. This is why community portals came in picture and community portal development become popular.

Read on till end to learn more about key functions, benefits and best practices of community portal development. Here experts team explains how community portal is beneficial for your company, business or organization. If still you have any confusion or you want to develop community portal team of experts would happy to help, just contact us with details you have.

What is Community Portal?

Community portal is a web portal that connect people of same interests. Community portal also helps in engaging interactions between company, organizations, business and communities of personal and professional same interests. User friendly and easy to navigate community portals help in seamless communication, efficient knowledge sharing and better collaboration. Here it is important to note that according to CMX,2022 87% organizations agree community is critical to their mission.

Key Functions of Community Portal

Community portal development equip portal with different combination of features to meet specific requirements of customers. Functions of community portal can be decided based on the type and purpose of the community. Some of the combinations used during the community porta development are as below

• Community membership (User registration, Profile creation, Membership programs, Role distribution with relevant privileges)
• Social engagement (Group discussions and forum, Private and public chats, Video chats, Comments, Social sharing)
• Content creation and management (Content templates, Easy search with tagging, Widgets for trendy topics, Discussion moderation tools)
• Knowledge transfer and training (Professional trainings, Partner certifications, Customer knowledge base, Learning management)
• Gamification (Likes and dislikes, Awards for active participation, Reputational badges, User ranking)
• Event management (Video streaming and recording, Personal user calendars, Event submission form, Calendar filter)
• Ad enablement (Ad templates, Banner, button and pop-up ads, Different ad placement options, Ad scheduling)
• Self-service (Ticketing system, Search widget, Automated chatbots, Interactive library of self-help materials)

Expert team of web portal development can deliver community portal for various audience. Robust community portal can easily meet the requirements of online communities with their different size, demographics or common interests. Community portal can be developed for customers, employees, partners or people with shared interests.

Community Portal Development Services Includes

Consulting – Expert team do detailed analysis of community portal needs, business process and people who are going to use it. Best community portal development services map out the future solution. Expert team can also help in selection of software delivery model and what features best suitable for your community portal.

Development – Community portal development can be divided in to two section first is custom community portal, in this team create community portal from scratch, covering the complete cycle of software development including prototyping, UX/UI design, back-end & front-end development, system integration, end-to-end testing & maintenance support. Second is Platform-based community portals, in this team of experts develop community portal on best available platforms aligned to your needs and objectives, tweak design so it coherent with your brand and at the end reduce implementation time within your means so you get full-fledged community solution.

Migration – Migration of community portal arise because legacy solution no longer meets to requirements so high-capacity community solution required. Community portal migration includes safe portal data migration, destination platform set-up, and comprehensive testing for error-free operation.

Modernization – To improve performance and to align community portal with current needs modernization of solution required. Process of community portal modernization eliminate outdated features and add new ones with the preservation of core features and functions of community solutions. Sometimes community portal modernization useful in creating engaging user interface to fuel community involvement.

Integrations – Community portal integration with third party systems allow to build one stop solution and reap more benefits from seamless data exchange. Popularly community portals are integrated with the digital ecosystem like CRM, ERP, Product Information Management, Data analytics software and ticketing system.

Process of Community Portal Development

Driving community engagement with effective portal is vital this is a reason people turn to companies like Falcon Online Services and get full range of community portal development services with the best community solution with efficient process as below

• Planning (Business needs analysis, Development strategy, Step-by-step project plan with deadlines)
• Design (Portal architecture, Visual style selection, UI mapping, Prototyping with formatted content)
• Development (Front-end and back-end development, Integration with other corporate systems, Risk mitigation)
• Testing (Functional testing, Unit and integration testing, Load testing)
• Deployment (Product release, Post-release testing, Staff training)
• Maintenance and support (Performance monitoring, Bug fixes, Software updates, On-demand training)

Top-notch technologies and tools to build a secure and reliable community portal is required. Strong online presence and growing engaged community can achieved through best practices followed in all 5 layers of community portal development that includes Experience (Visible Layer), Communication (Social Contact Layer), Satisfaction and Behaviour (Feedback and Behaviour Analytics Layer), Support (Self-Service Layer) and Engagement (Selling Layer).

Benefits of Community Portals

For both business and users community portals are beneficial. As it allows effective interactions between community members and bring various benefits to the audience and portal owners.

Community portal benefits for business includes enhanced community engagement, audience growth, data accumulation and analytics, improvement ideas, increased brand awareness, lower customer support costs and many more followed.

Community portal benefits for users includes better communication, community support, positive brand association, reliable knowledge source, flexible self-service, device-agnostic experience and many others.

How top performing community portals developed is always question for all. With best practices like simple and intuitive UI, user information privacy and security, mobile responsiveness, cyberbullying prevention, AI- and ML-based analytics it can be achieved. If you still have question for your community portal or want to develop community portal contact us and our team will guide you with best solution.

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