Creating Your Company's Extranet Portal
When companies want to allow their stakeholders to have easy access to company information, they typically create an extranet portal for individuals to access. Thereafter, anyone at the company with access information can log into the extranet portal.
When developing the portal, it is important to consider the overall extranet design. There are a number of reasons for this. To begin, you need to assume that someone who is not the most accustomed to technology will be accessing your portal. For this reason, it is important that the portal be very user-friendly.
With extranet design, the primary way to make your portal user-friendly is to make sure it is not cluttered with text on each page. Most users do not like to see a bunch of text blocks when they go to pages in extranet portals. You also need to keep in mind the color of the background for each page as well as the fonts and links. You will want to use colors that will complement one another and not clash.
While it is a good idea to have a checklist ready for your extranet project, it is recommended that your company hire someone experienced with extranet design to create the portal. When you have someone who has experience in this area, then things are highly likely to go more smoothly .
If it is just not in the company's budget to hire an extranet design expert, then take someone who is experienced with internet and computer technology to work on it. If your company has an I/T department, you can get someone from there or several people to work on the extranet development project. While you may not realize it, individuals will be able to see the difference between an extranet portal that an inexperienced person has designed.