Four Steps to Make Users Love Your Web Portal

With so many web portals available on the market, how do you make sure you give competitors a run for their money?

Attracting new clients to a digital business is never a walk in the park, and you should go the whole hog to succeed. Experts in web portal development, we recommend taking these four steps towards reinventing user interactions.

Ensure ease of use

Users are becoming choosier than ever, and to be in line with their needs, start with optimizing your web portal for usability.

Apart from creating a compelling look and feel, ensure smooth navigation across your web portal.

Take into account the peculiarities of cross-platform development as well as Human Interface and Material Design guidelines to empower users to browse on the go. Besides, leverage best practices around ADA and WCAG to accommodate website visitors with disabilities.

Give users an extra layer of comfort with powerful search capabilities. Tap into semantic search to never disappoint them with “zero results”. Up the ante with voice interactions and around-the-clock chatbot support.

Remember the importance of an easy registration and login process. Don’t annoy users with a lot of forms to fill in. Unleash the power of biometric solutions to enable faster access to your portal on mobile, tablets, and smart watch.

Leverage sophisticated functionality

To minimize website abandonment, provide users with all major features relevant to your business domain. An in-depth competitor analysis will help you come up with the optimal portal enhancement plan.

For example, if you own an eCommerce platform, accommodate customers with AR-powered try-ons, virtual assistants, hyper-personalized product suggestions, and interactive VR tours over your store.

Users of sports portals will certainly appreciate group chats, VoD libraries, advanced sports analytics, online betting functionality, AR/VR-enabled gamification, and chatbots ready to answer any question about their favorite players in a matter of seconds.

Other features you might need to consider — no matter your web portal type — are video conferencing, voice search, advanced user management, social media integrations, and engaging knowledge sharing.

Enable smooth and secure integrations

The internet swarms with web portals good enough to attract thousands of monthly users, giving their owners more bang for their buck.

But to create a consumer experience that transcends a typical “business-consumer” interaction, you need to remove the barriers between your website and third-party resources.

Namely, if your web portal sells products or services, integrate it with PCI-compliant payment solutions so that customers’ purchases would go off without a hitch.

Never underestimate the importance of social networks. Ensure smooth integration with Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google+ and other services.

This way, you’ll facilitate registration and login as well as increase brand awareness through social sharing of product reviews and other valuable user feedback.

Another case in point. If your web portal focuses on multimedia content or services, think connecting it with relevant digital marketplaces, giving an additional boost to user engagement.

Introduce powerful membership capabilities

If you don’t want your customers turn to competitor websites, focus on constantly fueling user interest.

Provide multiple purchasing options for your multimedia content, including subscription- and transaction-based ones.

Don’t be afraid to jump into loyalty programs with both feet. Introduce simple and effective reward schemes like bonuses for recurring purchases, product reviews, service recommendations, and more.

Also, engage users with location-based marketing offers. Notify music fans when their favorite band has a concert in a nearby city, send sports fans coupons when the outfits of their favorite football team are on sale, recommend users of your eLearning portal visit a relevant workshop in their neighborhood, etc.

A web portal that drives value — go for it now

Before you’ll be able to convert user interest into dollars, you should take a long journey towards user acquisition, retention, and engagement.

And all this is impossible without optimizing your online portal in terms of usability, performance, and security as well as equipping it with cutting-edge functionality.

Many digital businesses are already taking baby steps in the right direction. Are you ready to follow suit?

About the author:

Yana Yelina is a Technology Writer at Oxagile, a provider of software engineering and IT consulting services. Her articles have been featured on KDNuggets, ITProPortal, Jaxenter, Singularity Hub, and Datafloq, to name a few.

Yana is passionate about the untapped potential of technology and explores the perks it can bring businesses of every stripe. You can reach Yana at yana.yelina@oxagile.com or connect via LinkedIn or Twitter.

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