Website & Portal Solutions

What makes a portal different

A public website shows everyone the same thing. A portal decides, for every piece of content and every action, who is allowed to see it and who is allowed to do it.

That permission model is the project. Everything else — the design, the content, the features — sits on top of it.

Get the roles right before anything else

Model how your organisation actually works, not how the org chart says it works. Who approves, who publishes, who can only read, who administers, and what happens when someone holds two roles at once.

Two failure modes, both common:

• Too coarse. Everyone with an account can see everything, which is a security problem waiting to be noticed.
• Too fine. A permission for every action, and after a year nobody can say who can do what — so administrators grant everything to be safe, arriving at the first problem by a longer road.

When a portal is the right answer

• Different people need to see genuinely different things.
• Members self-serve: renewals, submissions, downloads, updating their details.
• You are handling by email something that should be a form and a workflow.
• An intranet, extranet or partner area is needed behind authentication.

When it is not

• Everything is public. Then you need a good website, and adding logins only adds a barrier.
• The audience is small and known. Sometimes shared documents and a mailing list genuinely are enough. We would rather say so than build you something to maintain.

Portals fail on ownership, not technology

The common ending is not a crash. It is a portal launched with good content that nobody updated, where the newest document is three years old and members stopped logging in.

Decide before launch who owns each area, how often content is reviewed, and how it expires. That decision does more for a portal’s lifespan than any technical choice in it.