Extend your business reach with smart web portal management

Businesses often reach a point where they need to scale their operations by expanding into new markets or targeting different customer bases. This expansion typically requires managing multiple sites that share similar functionality but need to cater to specific audiences with unique features.

Imagine you have a successful site, and you realize the same concept could work in another market, for example, the neighboring country. Your initial instinct might be to copy the existing site, make the necessary changes, and launch. However, this approach quickly becomes problematic.

The problem with copy-paste expansion

The first problem with doing this is you are now managing two sites with duplicated data and similar codebases. The more sites you create, the more environments you need to maintain.

If a bug is found on one, then odds are it will be on the other site. Fixing bugs or adding new features across multiple sites leads to inefficiencies and increased development costs.

As the number of sites grows you will also run into higher infrastructure costs, each site will require its own hosting, security measures, backups, and monitoring. so if you are running a dozen sites you are paying for a dozen different environments.

The problem with using a subsection of your site

A common alternative is to add region-specific sections to your main site, like your-site.de/austria. While this approach avoids the complexity of managing separate sites, it introduces its own set of challenges.

First, customizing these sections might prove difficult, since it’s still the same site. Your ability to fully localize the content, design, and functionality to meet the specific audience's needs is limited.

Second, using a subsection dilutes your trust factor. Customers in a specific region, for example in Austria, are more likely to trust a site with a local domain e.g., your-site.at rather than a subsection of a foreign site e.g., your-site.de/austria. This can make your business feel less authentic or relevant, potentially harming user engagement and conversion.

Third, determining which content applies to which market becomes murky and it becomes harder to manage region-specific regulatory and content requirements. If certain content or features are explicitly prohibited in one region but not in another, it’s difficult to ensure that users only access the appropriate content for their region. It’s easy for them to access the content they shouldn’t by just browsing through the site, creating compliance risks.

Finally, you will face SEO limitations, since search engines like Google tend to prioritize content from local sites with local domains over foreign sites when delivering results. This limits your visibility and organic traffic in the target market.

Why use a portal management system

A portal management system solves all these challenges by providing a centralized framework for managing multiple, region-specific sites, within a unified system. Each region would have its own site, complete with localized branding, content, and functionality while still sharing the same codebase and infrastructure. This allows you to efficiently manage multiple sites without duplicating effort. But the fun doesn’t end there, you can even share content between sites based on tags or user queries, and even though it’s the same content, it will appear as if it’s tailored to each site.

This may sound like a complex problem but believe it or not it’s one that most developers deal with.

Portal Management seeks to use this developer knowledge at a larger scale to provide a business solution. So let’s define what a portal is, and then we’ll look at why it might be the solution you are looking for.

Definitions

What is a Portal?

A portal is a web-based platform that provides users with access to information, tools, and services in a personalized way. Think of it as a gateway that delivers tailored content and functionality to different user groups based on their location or preferences.

For example, a job portal might display different job listings depending on whether the site is the German version or the Austrian version. Additionally, each site has its own URL (e.g., abc-jobs.de vs. xyz-jobs.at), but both operate from the same underlying system.

What is a portal instance?

Since we’re discussing portal management, it's important to distinguish between the server that hosts multiple sites and each individual site. In this post, I’ll use the term "portal instance" or simply "instance" to refer to a specific site within the overall portal management system.

The potential

Branding Customization

Portal management provides immense flexibility when it comes to branding. Depending on your target audience, you can easily customize each instance to have different colors, logos, or styles. In our job portal example, you could make the German site red, black, and gold while the Austrian site is red and white.

Between instances, you can have different:

• portal titles and slogans
• logos and background images
• fonts and text alignment (left-to-right or right-to-left languages)
• color palettes
• languages and localizations
• Meta-Data Management: Each portal instance can have unique SEO settings and custom social links.

The possibilities are endless, two instances of the same portal can look so different as to appear unrelated. This potential means you can customize each instance to fit your target audience better to improve engagement and user experience.

Functional Customization

The flexibility doesn’t just end at aesthetic changes, it also enables functional changes. This means you can modify the features of each instance to meet the needs of different audiences.

For example, the Austrian instance might have salary range information since that’s a legal requirement, but make it optional in Germany since it’s not legally necessary.

Some key examples of functional customization include:

• Content filtering: You can control what content appears on each instance, filtering based on language, region, or category.
• Feature flips: Enable or disable specific features on individual instances.
• Search Configuration: Customize search functions for each instance, adding filters or enforcing portal-specific search settings.
• Report Configuration: Provide instance-specific reporting, with different types of data aggregation tailored to each portal instance.
• Region-specific advertisements: You can control which adverts appear in which regions or if some regions don’t have any at all

Advantages

Centralized data management

Portal management allows you to control portal-specific data from one central location. You only need to define what the data for each instance looks like and the portal will handle the rest. This simplifies the content and features management.

Shared data

Another advantage is that you can share data between instances reducing duplication. if some data is common to a few or all of your instances, then you only need to define it once and it’s everywhere instantly, pardon the pun. So for example, in our job portal example, you can define a job once and it is shown in all regions if it is not region-specific or it is remote.

Consistent codebase

By using a single codebase, you ensure that any bugs fixed for one instance are automatically fixed in all other instances. Similarly, new features can be rolled out across all instances simultaneously or tailored for specific ones.

Shared infrastructure

All portal instances share the same infrastructure, which means reduced costs and easier management and monitoring. Rather than hosting multiple sites on separate servers, everything is managed under one roof, saving time and resources. And instead of worrying about ten separate systems, you only need to worry about one.

Easy scalability

When you want to expand your business into a new region, it’s as simple as adding a new configuration to your portal. You can spin up new instances quickly, with minimal effort and cost, allowing for rapid growth.

Challenges

I won’t say it’s all sunshine and rainbows though, there are some challenges to going down the portal route.

Added complexity

Portal management introduces complexity to your system. Each feature must be developed with instance-specific data in mind and must ensure that customizations are handled gracefully.

Not always worth the effort

If you’re only planning to manage one or two instances, setting up a full portal management system might be overkill. In these cases, the effort to maintain multiple instances could outweigh the benefits.

Single point of failure

With all instances sharing the same infrastructure, there’s a risk of a single point of failure. If the central system goes down, all portals will be affected. Proper planning, redundancy, and failover strategies are crucial to mitigate this risk.

Is Portal Management right for you?

Deciding whether portal management is the right solution depends on your business goals and growth plans. If you’re planning to scale quickly into multiple markets or cater to diverse customer segments, portal management provides a scalable and efficient way to manage multiple instances.

However, if your operations will remain relatively small, with only a handful of sites, the added complexity might not be worth it. In either case, careful planning is key to success. Starting small with just a few portals and gradually scaling up allows you to test the waters before fully committing.

At the end of the day, portal management gives you the flexibility to customize both branding and functionality across multiple sites, all while maintaining a unified system.

From the real world

Above we talked about what a portal is and the advantages and challenges of one. Now we thought it would be a good idea to give you a case study of one which we created for a German client of ours. Unfortunately, we can not share names just yet but as soon as we can we will update this post to include them so you can see it in action for yourself.

Our client runs a job portal, hence the examples above. The job portal was doing quite well for its size and business orientation and the client decided to grow the business. Based on customer feedback and due to SEO considerations, we decided to create several specialized sites for different types of job seekers. The short-term goal was to have sites for specific regions in Germany, with the long-term goal being to expand beyond Germany into other countries.

Each site needed different branding and customization while being managed centrally. So how did we achieve this feat and create a specialized job portal?

Case study - specialized job portals

We had several dimensions to handle and the potential number of portal instances could range from tens to hundreds. Our dimensions were 3 different brands, spread across 3 countries, various cities, and even more professions. So for example we could have a portal instance for jobs in Munich, Germany, another for IT jobs in Austria.

With that in mind, we decided to have proper portal management support from the get-go.

Technical Challenges

Firstly we needed a way to manage instance-specific data in the system. This means we needed some extra tables in our database for portal-specific content like default search configuration, and functional data. We needed to model the aforementioned dimensions and decide which combinations were allowed. For example, in every country, we wanted to have regional portal instances and profession-specific instances, but regional profession-specific portal instances would not have enough content to be of any use to users.

The next challenge was to have some kind of preparation logic (in our specific case as middleware) to detect and assign the precise instance based on the information from your user's requests, such as the domain they are accessing the portal on. This detection logic needed to be quite optimized, as it needed to be executed for every single request made to any portal instance.

After detection, the portal type and content information needed to be made accessible to the rest of the application, including the frontend and backend logic, which used it to implement the special handling needed.

The frontend needed to handle the different styles for each interface based on the portal type. Instead of coupling the display logic into the frontend we chose to generate several bundles for each instance and only use the appropriate bundle for each brand. This allowed the frontend code to remain fairly simple while allowing each brand to have its own look and feel.

For searching we applied geospatial filters on the search results for regional instances, and profession-based filtering for the profession-specific instances.

Another consideration is how the backend passed information to the frontend. We already mentioned that the frontend used separate bundles for each instance, but it would also need some explicit information about the instance and we passed this information in a configuration object.

The result

Once we implemented the logic for the different kinds of instances and managed the portal-specific data in the portal data management interface, adding new instances could be done with minimal effort and virtually no developer involvement.

The client could also remove and replace instances in case, for example, they decided to redefine the regions or clusters of professions they wanted to use.

Once in place, the portal management system gave them a lot of flexibility in managing portal instances. It only needed extension when they decided to add new features or requested that new data be made instance specific or they introduced a new kind of dimension to differentiate a different portal type that was not supported before.

Our client is currently managing between 100 and 200 portal interfaces across three different brands in several countries and has seen growing traffic due to targeting the audience in a better way - a success story we’re proud to be part of.

Finally

Got you interested? Don’t hesitate to contact us, our team of experts builds portal solutions tailored to your needs. We’ll work together to see if a portal management system is the right fit and if so we will gladly develop it for you.