Announcing the HAI Portal

Earlier this month, Marilyn and I put the HAI Portal live. We’ve been working on it for months and planning it for years. We have always wanted to give our clients a place where they can login and access their own information and links relating to their site. It’s been one of the many topics discussed and labored over during our company meetings. We’ve never quite been able to give them that, at least not to our satisfaction, until now! And, like most HAI projects, it sort of grew as we went along…

At the HAI Portal, you will see links to our main site and HAI Hosting as usual – hey we like to keep what you need just a click away! What’s new are the links to the Free Graphics, Links Directory, and the Client Portal. The Free Graphics and Links Directory aren’t technically new but they’ve been completely redesigned. The Free Graphics site is so much easier for us to manage, we’re hoping that will encourage us to keep those freebies coming. We’ve also got a feed for them now so anyone can get the latest freebies in their reader of choice and still via email. The Links Directory replaces the section that used to be on our main site and again, this one is much easier for us to manage which means we’ll be adding more links more often. You should especially visit the Sales & Deals section often since that’s where we’ll be posting about any specials, coupons, etc. from the affiliates we use to support our Free Graphics.

And now on to the best part … the Client Portal. Each of our clients has been provided with a username and password to their own, private and secure, section of the Portal. Here’s where we will provide them with their Search Engine Submission Reports, Search Engine Checks, copies of their invoices, site backups, and tons of other things. We no longer have to worry about sending large files attached to emails, we can upload those files and an email is sent to our clients and they can login and review their report online or download it at their leisure. No more giant PDFs received on BlackBerrys while our clients are on the go! We can add links to test sites for clients to review! The possibilities are endless and we are very excited about it!

How did we manage this? Well, a lot of hard work, tons of testing, and some pretty cool software to power it. The Free Graphics is powered by WSN Gallery which is just what it sounds like, an image gallery. We tweaked it a little, disabling the membership portions since we just want to display our free graphics and not bother visitors with asking them to join anything. Now, the Links Directory and Client Portal is powered by WSN Links from the same family of software as our Free Graphics. Big difference with this one is the massive amount of customization we did to which Marilyn deserves most of the credit. We now know these scripts inside and out and feel so comfortable with them that we are happy to say that we now offer installation and customization of these applications as part of our services. So, the Great Portal Experiment has been a win-win for everyone!

If anyone has any questions on the HAI Portal, any of it’s sections, suggestions for improvement, etc., don’t hesitate to ask or leave a comment to this post.