Building a portal from start to finish

A portal offers your clients or staff the opportunity to perform actions independently, without needing to contact other employees. Using a portal, such as an intranet, it’s possible to centralise information and optimise processes. The benefits? Lower personnel expenses, fewer mistakes and 24/7 service provision and availability.

Each portal is different, just like your preferences as an entrepreneur. When developing software, it is not enoughdoes not suffice to use a standard approach; it requires tailored work and constant monitoring. Making the process transparent is crucial as well. We achieve this by working in an MVP-based manner.

Building an MVP-based portal

Building a portal is custom work. This means that coming to fixed price agreements before starting is a challenge. Demands and priorities always change during the process, even when everything seems very logical at the start. Many software developers tend to set their agreements at the start of a track, which makes you, as an entrepreneur, feel like you know what to expect.

In an MVP-based approach, we estimate the number of hours needed to build a portal before starting our activities. We do this based on your needs and demands, as well as any comparable reference cases. This hour estimate will be the budget and is visible to every project member.

During the entire project, each choice by every team member will be made in light of the budget.

We offer:

1. A continuedous focus on priorities set by you, the customer. After all, the budget is limited.
2. A high level of commitment from developers to achieve the estimate, because the estimate is clearly related to the total budget and the objectives.

The budget remainsNo exceeding of the budget, guaranteed, plus valuable insights obtained during the development process. All factors considered, it equals higher quality at a better price.

User experience as a guideline

When designing a portal, user experience is the highest priority. Users need to be able to find information quickly. Of course, the design, style and look of the portal will have to match your enterprise, but for all the elements to be positioned in a logical fashion is an absolute necessity. We offer you the option of having this examined by one of our specialists.

We design the portal in cooperation with you. First in wireframes, after that in the form of a clickable graphical model. This allows you to see what the website’s design will look like straight away. It’s not set in stone, because as we pointed out, new insights come up during the development process every time.

The development phase: new software every two weeks

The development of your web portal is carried out by our international development team according to our scrum model: from the start of the building activities, we provide a new release of the software developed up to that point every two weeks (called a sprint). This means that your portal becomes available for testing after only two weeks, allowing us to include any new insights this generates in the subsequent sprints immediately.

The development of your web portal is carried out by our international development team according to our scrum model: from the start of the building activities, we provide a new release of the software developed up to that point every two weeks (called a sprint). This means that your portal becomes available for testing after only two weeks, allowing us to include any new insights this generates in the subsequent sprints immediately.

Thanks to our transparent working methods, you’ll be able to keep a constant eye on how many features can still be implemented after each sprint. We calculate this via a self-learning model. We aim to have the entire web portal ready at the second-last sprint. The reason is that we prefer to focus on details during the last sprint: styling, bug-fixing and optimising elements. The result? A high-quality end product, completed within your budget and ready to be implemented in production immediately.

Stand-by team

The software landscape is continuously changing. For this reason, it will take maintenance to keep your portal up and running. In addition, the success of your portal will result in new requirements for the software. We offer aftercare in the form of monthly service hours. During these hours, our employees will be on standby. We always agree on the hours ahead of time, meaning no new contractual agreements will have to be negotiatedconcluded. If no service is needed, we charge no fees. Our maintenance programme offers you a powerful team of specialists, a team you only pay for when you need it.

A portal is…

The definition of a portal is a wide one. At Second Company, the definition is phrased succinctly as ‘everything after login’. Building a portal provides access to various services, ranging from entering or adjusting personal data and maintaining client communication to payments and concluding contracts. More options become available constantly, and we must adapt to these changes. Second Company aims to make processes faster, better and more affordable, and offers you access to the best developers worldwide. Are you ready for the best?