01 · web portal development

Web portal developmentcustom and turnkey

Sign-up, profiles, posts, ratings, search and moderation on one fast portal. People come back on their own, and thousands of pages bring in search traffic

Timeline
from 8 weeks

What portal do you want to build

A city portal and a community of interest have different users and different reasons to come back. We build the structure around your audience

  • 01

    Industry portal

    News, companies and professionals from one industry in one place. People come for business and stay if their peers are there

    • Directory of companies and experts
    • News and articles from members
    • Tenders, jobs and listings
    • Paid placements for companies
  • 02

    City or regional portal

    Everything about the city on one site: what opened, what happened, where to go. Traffic runs on fresh content and neighborhood pages

    • News feed with sections
    • Places and venues on a map
    • Neighborhood and street pages
    • Moderated listings from residents
  • 03

    Community of interest

    Forum, clubs and discussions. People stay for other members’ replies and their own reputation, not for editorial copy

    • Forum with topics and threads
    • Profiles, reputation and badges
    • Direct messages and follows
    • Reports and moderator roles
  • 04

    Events listing and calendar

    Exhibitions, concerts, meetups and courses, filtered by date, venue and format. Every event gets its own page in search

    • Calendar grid and filters
    • Event submission by organizers
    • Venue and organizer pages
    • Favorites and reminders
  • 05

    Business directory with reviews

    People are choosing who to trust with a job. Honest reviews, a clear rating and protection from fake reviews make the call

    • Listings with photos, prices and address
    • Verified reviews and ratings
    • Company account and review replies
    • Comparisons and curated lists
  • 06

    Media with authors and subscriptions

    A publication written by more than staff writers. Editors keep the quality up, readers follow the authors they care about

    • Author workspace and editing
    • Follow authors and topics
    • Moderated comments
    • Email newsletters by interest

The user journey from search to habit

Six steps from the first visit to coming back without a search engine. At each one, the portal does its job

  1. 01Thousands of indexed pages

    Finds a page in search

    Every topic, company, event and neighborhood is its own page with its own title and description. People land right on the answer

  2. 02One-minute sign-up

    Signs up

    Email, phone or social login. Sign-up is offered at the right moment: to reply, rate or save something

  3. 03Their own content

    Creates a profile or a post

    A profile, a forum thread, a review, an event or an article. An editor with photos and drafts that is easy to use on a phone

  4. 04Queue and filters

    Goes through moderation

    A filter catches spam and links, the rest goes to a moderator’s queue. If a post is sent back, the author sees the status and the reason

  5. 05Notifications

    Gets responses

    A reply, a new review, an approved post: a notification on the site, in Telegram or by email, whichever the user chose

  6. 06Reputation and follows

    Comes back

    Reputation, followed topics and authors, picks based on interests. People no longer come from search — they come because someone is waiting for them

In every portal

  1. 01Sign-up, login and user profiles
  2. 02Posts, comments and a forum
  3. 03Ratings, reviews and reputation
  4. 04Site search with filters and suggestions
  5. 05Moderation: queue, reports, roles
  6. 06Notifications on site, in Telegram and by email
  7. 07SEO structure for thousands of pages without duplicates
  8. 08Admin panel for editors and moderators
  9. 09Fast mobile version
  10. 10Analytics with goals and backups

Everything that keeps people on the portal

A portal stays alive as long as it is easy to find what you need and see who replied to you. These parts work togetherinstead of being bolted on one by one

The portal includes: Site search, Ratings, Moderation, Notifications, Telegram, Email newsletters, Analytics, CDN

That is how we built Mafia.game, an international portal for the game of Mafia: club search, ratings, reviews and schedules, 474 partner clubs and the #1 spot worldwide by traffic. Another example is Expo Afisha, a business events catalog with event submission and moderation

What a portal has to withstand

More people means more load, more spam and more pages. We build this into the architecture from day one instead of fixing it after the first surge

  • Peak traffic

    A story goes viral or event registration opens — the site stays up. Pages are served from cache and a CDN, heavy jobs go to a queue

  • Spam and fake activity

    Rate limits, checks on new accounts, link and stop-word filters. Suspicious ratings never make it into the score

  • Moderation and reports

    Moderator roles with different permissions, a content queue, a report button on every post and a log of decisions

  • Personal data

    Consent at sign-up, storage that complies with personal data protection laws, account deletion on request, and staff access only to what they need

  • Thousands of pages, no duplicates

    Canonical URLs, filters and empty pages kept out of the index, and a sitemap that updates itself

  • Backups

    Daily backups of the database and files, with tested restores. If something breaks, we roll back in hours instead of rebuilding the portal

Portal development: packages

The cost depends on scope. We send a detailed estimate the day after the brief and don't change it after kickoff unless the scope changes

  • Starter portal

    Custom quote

    8–10 weeks

    • Sign-up, profiles and posts
    • Sections, search and comments
    • Moderation and email notifications
    • Admin panel and analytics with goals
    Get an estimate
  • Community portal

    Custom quote

    12–16 weeks

    • Ratings, reviews and reputation
    • Forum, follows and direct messages
    • Telegram notifications and newsletters
    • Protection from spam and fake activity
    Get an estimate
  • Large portal

    Custom quote

    from 20 weeks

    • Company accounts and paid placements
    • Structure for hundreds of thousands of pages
    • Cache, CDN and peak-load planning
    • Integrations and API exports
    Get an estimate

What drives the cost

  • Migrating an existing portal with its users, posts and URLs
  • Online payments, subscriptions and paid placements
  • A mobile app for members
  • Video, live streams and heavy media
  • Custom design from scratch instead of adapting your brand style

How a project runs

  1. 01

    Brief and estimate

    2–3 days

    A one-hour call: who the users are, what they post and who reviews it. A couple of days later you get an estimate broken into stages

  2. 02

    Prototype and design

    2–3 weeks

    A clickable prototype of the key flows, then the design. Changes happen before development, not after

  3. 03

    Staged development

    per estimate

    We show each stage on a staging site and sign it off. You pay stage by stage

  4. 04

    Launch and support

    30 days

    Load testing, indexing and analytics setup, moderator training. A month of support is included

Common questions

Open 01 of 07

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Ask on Telegram
  1. Users create the content

    On a regular website the company writes and visitors read. On a portal people sign up, post, rate and reply to each other. That is why it needs sign-up, moderation, ratings, notifications and an architecture built for load and thousands of pages

  2. We usually recommend Next.js with a custom admin

    For a portal with lots of pages and users, custom development on Next.js is faster and needs no annual licenses or bending ready-made modules to fit. If your portal already runs on a CMS and you have a team maintaining it, we can extend it or migrate the users and posts

  3. Yes, these are common requests

    An education portal means student and teacher profiles, materials, discussions and notifications. A forum means topics, threads, reputation and moderation. Both are built from the same parts as any portal, set up around your rules

  4. We build load into the architecture

    Pages are served from cache and through a CDN, heavy operations run in the background. Before launch we run a load test at the volumes you expect and show you the results

  5. We don’t promise numbers before launch

    That depends on the topic, the content and the promotion. What we do promise is a search-friendly structure, fast performance and analytics with goals on sign-ups and posts, so you can see what works

  6. Your moderators, with our tools

    We set up roles with different permissions, a content queue, a spam filter and user reports. We train your moderators at launch. Some checks run automatically, and a person decides the borderline cases

  7. The code is yours, hosting is your call

    We hand the source code and all access over to the portal owner. We host it where users’ personal data is stored in line with the law, or on your own server

Let's discuss your portal

Tell us who the portal is for and what users will post there. We reply within two hours during business hours and send an estimate after the brief

Type of portal

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