What a client portal is
A client portal is a private area of a business’s own website that clients sign in to. Each client sees only the work being done for them: how far it has got, what is needed from them, and their invoices. The portal is where all of that lives, and when they have a question they write it there rather than in a new email.
The one I built runs on this website, and it is the same portal you can run on yours.
The portal is a page on your website
Your portal sits at your own address — yoursite.com/portal — in the same style as everything else on the site. The same colours, the same typefaces, the same buttons. A client does not leave your website to reach it, and does not arrive at something that looks like it belongs to another company.
The header is simpler than on the rest of the site: your logo, your name, and a way to sign out. Someone who has come to look at their project does not need the menu that sells your services.
Until a client signs in, that address shows the form in the picture above: one field, one button. That is the front door.
A client types the email address you know them by, and a link arrives in their inbox. Clicking it opens their portal. No password, nothing to install, and no account for them to create — you add a client, and there is no signup form for anyone else to find.
The link is good for fifteen minutes and one click. Once they are in they stay signed in for a day, and after that they ask for another link.
What a client finds in it
A client signs in and sees the work being done for them, and nothing of anyone else’s.
Each project shows where it has got to: the phase it is in, and a dated list of what has happened. What the project needs from the client is a separate list — the photos, the final text, the logo files — with whatever has arrived already ticked off.
Their invoices are there, with what is still to pay, and the invoice itself to download.
There is a box on the same page for asking a question. What the client sends reaches you with their name and their project already attached. A copy goes to their own inbox, and your answer comes back to them there.
What it can be
A portal is shaped around one business, so no two are the same.
Invoices can come straight from your bookkeeping as the page opens, so nothing is copied and nothing goes out of date. Where the bookkeeping offers an online payment page, the client gets a button to it. If your bookkeeping cannot be reached from a website, the invoices can be kept as files instead. And a portal with no invoices at all shows projects and nothing else, which is what plenty of businesses want.
The phases follow the work you do. You decide what the steps are called and how many there are — the words you already use with your clients. Your client sees those steps on their project page, with the one the work has reached marked, so a single look tells them where things stand.
Why it is safe
No passwords. There is no password anywhere in it. Nothing to guess, nothing to steal, nothing reused from another site that got broken into.
The sign-in link works once. Fifteen minutes, one click, and then it is dead — even in somebody else’s hands.
Nobody sees another client’s work or invoices. Asking for somebody else’s invoice gets the same answer as asking for one that does not exist.
Access can be ended at any moment. A client who loses a laptop can sign out at once on every device they have used. When you stop working with someone, you take them off the list and they are out the next time they open a page.
Invoices cannot be stumbled on. An invoice document has no web address of its own. Nobody finds one by guessing, and nobody shares one by accident.
Part of your own website
A portal is part of the website, on your own domain and under your own name. Your clients are not signing in to somebody else’s product with somebody else’s logo in the corner, and there is no second service to manage.
Because the portal is made from the same pieces as the rest of the site, your colours, your typefaces and your logo carry into it on their own. There is no second design to pay for and nothing that has to be kept looking like the rest by hand. That is more than a convenience: the portal is built from Astro Rocket’s own components, so a site running the theme already has everything the portal needs.
Ask me, and it is yours
The portal is free to use. It runs here so I can test it, and if your website runs on Astro Rocket you can run it too.
Ask me for it and I will give it to you. You install it and build your own website — that part stays with you, and I advise and help where you get stuck.
Questions are welcome, including the one about whether a portal is the right thing for you at all.
Why I built this, and why I built the members area
I’m interested in this kind of solution on an Astro website — for the businesses and clubs and other organisations that need one. A business needs a client portal. A club needs a members area. It is interesting how it works, and it has to be safe.
So I built both. This one gives each person their own — one client’s projects and one client’s invoices, and the next client signing in sees a different set of pages. A members area gives every member the same: one set of reserved pages that all of them read, with nobody having records of their own. Which one a website needs comes down to whether the people signing in are looking at the same thing or at different things.
I built them on this website to make them work and to test them. Building for yourself is the best way, because you can test it all the time — on the site you use every day, where you would notice the morning it broke.
Also worth reading
Client portals on an Astro website — what one is, and which businesses need one.
Members Area — part of a website only its members can read, closed to everybody else.
Hans Martens Dev — the website this portal was built on.