Portais web e desenvolvimento de projetos online altamente carregados

A web portal is a website on a computer network that provides the user with various interactive Internet services that work within this site. This distinguishes them from ordinary websites intended only for displaying web pages. Portals also function as points of access to information on the Internet or sites that help users find the correct information. Such portals provide information from various sources in a uniform way. As a rule, portals perform search functions and provide access to multiple services, such as e-mail, newsfeed, forum, etc.

The concept of web portals is to provide the maximum number of Internet services in one place to attract a significant number of users, so web portals are almost always high-load online projects. General-purpose and niche portals are conditionally distinguished depending on the degree of specialization.

A general-purpose portal covers many topics, representing a set of services (serving, if possible, all issues) and aimed at the broadest possible audience - for the maximum coverage of its interests. The most striking is probably Yahoo! Such portals usually combine a variety of functions, offer diverse content and various services (news, financial, entertainment, gaming, etc.).

A niche portal is a narrow thematic portal that provides various services for network users for specific interests and is focused on full coverage of a particular topic or field of activity. This type of portal can include a marketplace, for example, AliExpress.

But in addition to web portals, many projects work with high traffic and high load. We will try to describe them in more detail.

News portals.

As the name implies, news from different sources is presented here in a structured form. The most valuable is the author's content, but it is possible to use data collected manually or automatically from other authoritative resources. The range can be diverse-streaming media, photos, videos, audio, digitized documents, calendar events, author's and editorial publications, market indices, and indicators.

Usually, owners of information portals possess large amounts of information, and they need its convenient presentation to their readers without involving third-party resources or the media. In most cases, the vital issue is retaining and expanding their audience to attract new advertisers to the portal and offer their readers paid subscription services. Advertising and subscriptions are typically the primary sources of income for them. Of course, this does not apply to portals fully financed from state and municipal budgets. Such sites frequently have sociopolitical goals but still require the proper structure to retain users by providing up-to-date official information and access to archival documents.

Thus, regardless of the goals of the information portal, it must have several necessary properties-informativeness, attractiveness, ease of use, accessibility, irrespective of the number of users.

The widespread use of mobile devices requires creating a mobile application for convenient content consumption on the go. A simple layout of portal pages for standard browsers of smartphones and tablets may not help here. It is difficult to imagine a large media company that continues on-air broadcasting but misses the opportunity to receive the same content through a mobile application conveniently.

Corporate portals.

It is no longer possible to imagine a large company without its information website. With the growth of volume and expansion of the geography of the business, there is a natural need to improve customer interaction. However, business grows in breadth and depth too. The consequence of narrowing the interests of Internet users was the emergence of a massive number of companies with competencies in a very narrow segment. That users’ interest in highly technical information is caused by the desire to save on attracting a specialist and a natural craving for new knowledge.

It has become a vital need for all companies, large and small, to interact with the client online. Everything that used to be solved only in person or by phone has now been transferred online, convenient for the client. And here, corporate portals offer current news and promotions, e-commerce, giant arrays of reference information (documents, instructions, specifications, drivers), dynamic feedback forms, technical support chats, internal messaging services between company employees, and much more come. An excellent example of the development of corporate portals is the banking sector. The abandonment of paperwork and the lack of geographical and time-binding transactions have revolutionized finance. Working with electronic money for the first time has become more convenient than paper money!

Please note that each large company offers its customers a mobile application that simplifies interaction with its information portal, and not only. Push notifications about events, promotions, discounts reach the target audience faster, attracting them to the brand and encouraging them to interact with the company. So, the corporate portal should be holistic, responsive. Also, it has to have easy navigation and a mobile application.

Educational portals.

The educational portal combines technologies for convenient perception of knowledge and its successful assimilation. The combination of audiovisual material streaming, knowledge base, testing platform, high load capability requires a robust hardware and software platform. Integration with all payment systems should allow automating the payment process, and information security solutions have to prevent unauthorized access and distribution of training materials. Ready-made solutions do not have such a combination.

Information educational portals have not yet shown their full power. The reason is the ongoing search for methods of interaction that allow you to achieve results comparable to offline learning. This is especially true for children's and school education.

While child psychologists are working on these issues, heads of private and public educational institutions and large universities have already found their niche. The Internet provided unprecedented distance learning opportunities, and considering the rich academic experience of classical higher education, it opened up new educational opportunities for an adult audience. Many students previously did not want or did not have options to get special education, but over time saw it as opportunities for career or personal growth. Although it is still impossible to technically organize online laboratory and practical classes for students, theory teaching, testing, exams have already been implemented at a decent level. As a rule, this is one-way interaction by audiovisual means in the direction from the teacher to the students, and the feedback is carried out in the chat.

But not only additional education motivates the audience. People want to diversify their leisure time, expand their circle of hobbies: top-rated physical and spiritual improvement courses, handicrafts, and creative skills are already online.

Conducting webinars, training, seminars, and discussions, regardless of the location of the listeners, has ceased to surprise and has become a routine.

Textbooks, manuals, reference books, and other digitized paper materials for self-study also attract users' attention on the network. These archival sources of knowledge never age and are in demand by each generation, despite the appearance of more advanced electronic analogs. But they also increase the load on the web portal.

Marketplaces.

Nowadays, marketplaces are an important sales channel for businesses. Product sales on those platforms also attract new customers and increase brand awareness. The world's well-known platforms eBay, AliExpress, Wildberries, and others partially solve this problem. But let's take a broader perspective and talk about niche marketplaces.

Many companies and brands offer their customers a limited range of products or work with a minimal audience. It is difficult for such companies to find their client on large marketplaces. Biased search results and high competition with cheap goods of the same segment make selling there tricky.

In such cases, it is reasonable to think about niche marketplaces. What advantages does it provide?

• Being competent in a narrow segment, niche marketplace allows the client to find exactly what he needs. As a result, the number of returns after purchases decreases, reducing the load on the delivery service.
• The niche marketplace has a good idea of a potential buyer, thanks to which it attracts customers with a formed intention to buy a specific product. They don't need to be convinced because they know their own need.
• A good niche marketplace will not arrange internal competition among quality products of one brand but will prioritize the variety of offers in the chosen niche.
• Such a marketplace develops its logistics and warehouse system, controls the assortment in the warehouse, and buys the necessary goods promptly, avoiding a shortage. The courier service understands better how to handle a particular product correctly during the delivery process.

Niche marketplaces have huge development potential. The trend of online sales success is the best customer satisfaction, not the minimum price of the product.

Business automation.

Automation is a specific set of actions (steps, stages, functions) carried out in a particular order to achieve the company's goals. Business process automation transfers routine, simple tasks to automation services. Thanks to this, you can process orders, issue invoices, send goods, and much more automatically, without the participation of people.

By automating and standardizing these actions, you can establish effective communication with customers and ensure continuous dialogue between departments in your company. As a result, you keep customers and increase the profit of your business.

As the company grows, the scope of work also increases dramatically. For example, sending ten invoices or 1000 ones is technically quite different. The situation is the same with other processes in the company - from recruiting to procurement management.

Business automation solutions are frequently built as high-load projects. This is especially true for financial organizations, as data delays or unavailability entail significant material losses.

Payment systems.

Payment systems may belong directly to financial organizations or non-financial ones. Usually, the payment system acts as a banking service gateway. Such systems are high-loaded, as they provide simultaneous processing of requests from tens of thousands of users. Affiliate programs, billing software, and client bank systems have many commonalities- multilingual options, multi-currency processing, cryptographic defense, high-security requirements, etc.

Web development process.

When discussing creating a web portal or other high-load project, we mean using a specialized platform. There are no general-purpose platforms that can fully perform the described functions. To a lesser or greater extent, they can imitate a web portal, but they cannot fully perform its functions. X Networks is proud to use its QSNE platform, which has absorbed the result of the company's many years of experience. The use of a stack of modern technologies allows you to implement any high-load project, including a web portal.

The process of interaction with the customer is transparent. It consists of several clear stages, but some steps can be skipped or supplemented since the implementation of each web project requires an individual approach:

1. Discussion of the project of a web portal. An agreement on the concept; determination, selection, consolidation, and analysis of the basic requirements for the future project.
2. The preparation of the technical task requires the participation of several specialists: a web analyst, a project manager, a programmer-architect, and a software project creator. We help to understand and formulate the project's goals based on your vision andconsider our experience.
3. Prototyping interface elements and project appearance-formation of the layout of each page.
4. An integrated visual solution or corporate identity of the website.
5. Creation of multimedia components: graphic, sound, video, animation, and other elements.
6. The layout of individual pages and topics.
7. Developing a functional part (programming) or resource integration into a software and hardware complex.
8. Testing and optimization of functional modules.
9. We place the pre-release version with the primary content on the test domain.
10. Final testing and amending the system (if required).
11. We launch the web portal by publishing the finished site on the public domain.
12. Maintaining an active project, controlling the software's correctness, project marketing, and SEO promotion.

Clients do not need to fill any brief. Instead, the company X Networks draws up a documentary concept of the project according to the global trends and the client's tasks and helps formulate requirements for a future project. Unlike many web studios, we minimize bureaucratic procedures to ease the development process and achieve the goals the best way!