How To Add A Client Portal To Your WordPress Website Using ClientPortal - Review & Tutorial

In this video I am going to show you how to add a custom Client Portal to your website using a tool called ClientPortal now this is ideal for so many situations and think about it I know for me for my cell phone I use AT&T wireless and what do I do when I want to contact AT&T wireless or have anything to do with my billing or see a bill or anything like that what I do I log into the ClientPortal same thing I use DirecTV now it's a TV service if I ever want to change my planner see anything going on I just log into the ClientPortal for DirecTV now all of the services that we use in our daily lives what we do when we want to reach out to that we log into the ClientPortal and this is a tool that's can allow you to turn your WordPress website will actually not turn in existing website just added into your WordPress website you knocking the need to add a new website to your hosting or anything like that I were to go over ClientPortal in this video hi my name is Atul from WPCrafter.com where I make tactics and tutorial videos on how to grow your income and influence on line if you know your consider clicking on the subscribe button if you don't want to miss a thing click on the bell all right let's just jump right on into this one here's the ClientPortal website I have some great news for you today if you visit WPCrafter.com/ClientPortal one word it's going to take you here to AppSumo which lined up the most killer deal on this WordPress plug-in I'm going to show you the plug and in this video I went to show you how it all works and all of that and give you some of the pros and cons and all that kind of stuff like I normally do but I'm just gonna let you know right now this is kind of a no-brainer deal this is it I mean it's really nice you'll see this in the video okay so it's only $39 and that's can it allow you to install this and get updates on one website one website can have unlimited projects clients and all that kind of stuff however if your say a web designer developer there are many use case scenarios where you would want to use this for your clients websites and so if you bought two of these so it's called the two stack so if you bought two of these on check out the only differences now you'll be able to get an unlimited license for it let me just put this into perspective so if you bought two these can be at what 78 bucks this is how much it normally costs on their websites if I go to pricing it's 279 for a single site license and the multi site is 479 so it's a really amazing deal and as you see the quality of this plug-in and what it can do for you I think you'll agree with me now normally I would add scroll through this and go over some of the points but it's it's all pretty straightforward because it's a WordPress blog and so you get the plug and you get a lifetime license email support and access to all future updates and this is a plug-in that has received lots and lots of updates in fact there's a lot of viewers here on the channel that prepaid the normal price for this and use it on their website and their perfectly happy with that because it's that good of a plug-in let's think a look at their website and go over what this is and what this does and then will jump into the website that I've installed it so I can show you some things that I discovered with it and also talk about some maybe alternatives that you might want to consider as well okay so here's the ClientPortal's website I encourage you if you're interested in checking this out definitely jump over to their website WB crafter.com/ClientPortal it'll take you over here and you can first see the live demo and that's going to give you an idea of what this does so essentially just a WordPress plug-in install it on your website you can create client projects you add clients when they login they see their project and this is pretty much what it's going to look like if I go to the demo right here so you have the option to put in the clients logo you can changes to their colors if you want to just said global colors that match your brand and then here's a little bit bit of information you can put in on how they can reach you here's some phases as you can let them know where you currently are in the project what's next in the project and what the deadline is you can have as many phases to the project that you want you can have as many of these boxes now each of these boxes can do one of three things number one they could take you someplace else so say you have a travel board that you want to let them know that you have will they can click on this will take them to that trail aboard you can have one of these just for that or say you want one of these to link to a file and you could also have one of these linked to a content page that is unique to the client to the customer that you've created this for it's very flexible and these checkboxes here that you see on the top right these just are indicators that the task of this part of the phase is done and so you get these options to have checkboxes you don't have to if you don't want to so if I click on this one and I'm just on their website right now you can see it shows you one of their content pages you can have this custom looking portal available to each of your clients for content you want to give to them and the navigation off to the side but there is also other things you can obviously do so if you click on this it's going to jump open into a new tab and taken to a Google doc so this is how you can have everything consolidated into one location normally what you're doing is you're emailing them links the things your email your client's bills or emailing all these things and it can be a bit much to stay organized so kind of the intention of this tool is to have one location that your clients can log into and everything is there links to everything is there links to the bills the PDFs the information it's all right here in one location for each of your clients slowly scroll down here to give you an idea of how some of the documents work with it so you can have a section set up for your documents so here's a real interest on interesting one invoice receipts and when you click on it this a beautiful pop-up comes up and you have a link for them to each of the various bills that you might have sent them and they're all right here someone can click on this and I will just open up all just downloaded the PDF so let me go ahead and close that and it will just download the PDF like that and so some of these right here you click on it and it's the same thing you can have all of the documents organized in one place you can have the different design assets like logos things like that all linked here in one spot is actually a really cool app and so when you come to their homepage one thing I like when you scroll down here it's saying don't think of this as a project management software it's not a project management software is a ClientPortal the one centralized location that your client can log into and access everything and it really solves a huge need of having that centralized location that is easy to put together looks super professional that you can give to your clients so you're making working with you as easy as possible and I really like this right here so on the homepage they kind of list out a typical workflow and this is a typical workflow when you go through it so yet you're using Google Docs for document collaboration using dropbox to share files and keep files in sync hello sign for signing and storing contracts are new see or hear it is newsy for proposals or better proposal or something like that you're using for all your proposals you have something separate for your website prototypes etc. etc. your Trapelo your slack so what this is doing is giving you a central location for your client to login to access all of these resources that you already using your current workflow this is really the easiest software for providing a custom experience like this on brand on your website to come across as professional as possible to your clients it's very impressive it's very impressive to me let's go to the top take a look at the normal pricing and then I will show you the plug-in in action on my website but I've deftly encourage you to come here and check out the demo so I'm to go ahead and click on pricing you could check it out it's normally 279 for a single site license you can have as many clients and projects as you want on the single sites of your just a single design agency and you're making these or any kind of business that you would benefit from having a centralized location of four clients to login to this is all you would need right here now if you were a developer and you wanted to make these four customers or add this to projects based upon the requirements of various projects now Juergen have an easy way of actually doing this without custom coding or using any kind of substandard plug-ins that might currently be available it's 479 now I about three years ago did a project for someone where a custom portal ClientPortal like this was required at that time I looked at all the options available in the same options world available today with the exception of ClientPortal and so your option was to custom code something and that was the ideal solution back then but you're the cost of custom coding the solution is very very high and the potential for something to break in the future is also very high so that was one thing that I had in mind but there was also free plug-in and it was very restrictive and ugly and not flexible so it wasn't really a great solution anyway we tried going that route and then we had to go a custom coded route so the cost of this is actually very affordable for this type of functionality it's very affordable okay so let's go ahead and jump on into it all let me show you one more thing so if you click on the support and I definitely would suggest clicking on support on their website it goes here and this is a ClientPortal but it's public so they actually use their own tool to make their own support portal so when you come here they just put their logo in there and you can tell the only thing I don't like about using it for your own support is you if you look at the URL right here the slug is/client and you can't get rid of that and that's okay that you can't get rid of that but this is what they use for their own support but it's a beautiful support area so the same thing you have your information here a lot of things I showed you earlier you can enable or disable and I'll show you how to do that in this video but then here instead of phase 1 phase 2 phase 3 well section 1 getting started and this is exactly the solution but she's using it to the website using it in this way I really like that because I liked it a lot helped as before and they don't look as friendly and inviting as this this looks really good so there's a lot of other use case scenarios for this plug-in but you're primarily gonna really just want to use it for ClientPortal's but it's pointing out that you can use it for a public portal and so you want to actually go through here there some things to consider so when you're going through here you will realize it so one of the things was when I scroll down here to where was it it's under security. His right here how do I hide ClientPortal from search results now in your SCO plug-in it will see the custom post type that gets created and you can set that to not be indexed but when you click on here for the support you might want to add this to your robots.txt file right there okay so that's one thing but your SCO plug-in can probably do that just as easily for you also right here are my file save if you upload them to the ClientPortal for your clients and when you scroll down here it makes reference to an update that was supposed to come out this year I will have to test it myself typically when you upload a file to WordPress it organizes it in certain folders of someone had the URL to that particular file it would show the file whether it's in the membership area or not however according to this they put out an update in early 2018 that made it so when you uploaded a file in ClientPortal it would be secure and not accessible unless someone was actually logged in that is a really good option there so earlier today I posted a link to the essay and I was can make a review on this website this product and show you guys how to add it to your website and the conversation started flowing in the Facebook group I have a link in the video description box to the Facebook group if you're interested in joining it it's free of course and the conversation came up oh well how is this better than just Google docs while I think it's obvious that if you gave your client a login it's a custom branded log and they come here they have access to everything and not not just Google docs related this is a much more seamless and beautiful experience professional experience a lot more flexible experience that you have full control over less of a learning curve the your clients are ready to know how to log into things all they have to do this is login as ever clients never use Google docs before now they've got a login to Google docs and it's just not so easy and the same would go for cello if you just wanted use a trail aboard and said something like this and you just hang your client billing to travel aboard their probably not get a look at it ever because doesn't fully make sense to them so what you know and what you're comfortable using your experience using various tools is going to be much different than your client you want to make everything as easy as humanly possible for your client and not make any assumptions about what they feel comfortable using this insanely easy big boxes nice symbol however affect icon it goes to custom content to them or the various items for them to download it's an absolute no-brainer for your clients okay so here I am I've already installed the plug-in on the website here and I want to show you what happens when you activated it adds this link right here or this new menu item sorry called ClientPortal now when you hover over it you have the option to add a new project or to see all your projects at a new project and one things I like is you can set project templates up so a lot of the different projects that you do were probably going to have the same structure and same flow there might be a different link to different drillable order different contractor something like that but the whole structure of everything is pretty much probably to be the same and most of them so when you're getting this system implemented for you you just pretty much create a project template that is all set up for the way that you work and then when you want to go and create new projects you would base it off of the template you can convert a project into a template as well okay and here's where you can manage all of the content pages some to show you how to create content pages super easy and here's some overall settings of the first thing you want to do is jump into the settings of this organist at some global settings now each of these are actually customizable based upon the project so if you wanted to have a project with some logs and have it to really wow them and have it match their colors you could do that if you wanted to so you want to come here first and feel this on out so you pop your logo in here and really you're gonna want to set your colors so the background color so right here it's his primary background color that is this color right here so you can choose whether you wanted to be your brands color or your clients Brands color it's up to you but you would set that right here and here are the various colors that you get control over you can drop some custom strips scripts in here this is cool if you wanted add maybe some live chat or something to it you can definitely do that and have a just appear in the back and for the ClientPortal not on the front end that some great support popping your phone number your email and then there's this general information area so they already have some text here that you could use if you wanted to and you can customize us on a client by client basis this blob of text right here is what it appears right here so you can just set it up and in this one location and have that be what everybody sees in the example here it's being used to relay contact information and stuff like that so that's this area right here and it comes prefilled out this text I really like that and then you have the granular control over the visual aspects of the tool so you can show the project status if you want the markets complete boxes if you want what is the default behavior when someone clicks on one of those boxes does it open up in a new tab collapse all modules and here's a display the powered by link in the example I'm in a show you I disabled that already you can see I chose no so the first thing you're gonna want to do is jump in here to the ClientPortal settings so now what you're going to do is your window when you want to start a new project you would go and click on add new first thing you would do is give it a name and then right here you would choose if you want to use one of the templates now the tool does not come with templates done for you so you would basically set up your first project and kinda make it as a template or just go and click on add new project template and start it out that way but I'm a show you how you can convert a project into a template for later reuse okay and so here you can add some custom branding if you want so this is going to be the colors that I just showed you so you can override them if you wanted so for this particular project if I wanted it to be a different background color I could do that different colors I could do that so to you can add a clients logo if you wanted to have it really be punchy and look great you can control the width so you can either have a go as wide as the logo is that you uploaded or you can just have it defaulted to 70 wide okay and you can also put a header image and also of the rest of this information is going to pull from the ClientPortal settings so you don't need to change any of these only thing you'd want to change probably sell a logo and if you wanted to customize it just specifically for this client and so here's that same general information that I was talking about that was set up in the ClientPortal settings so you have that right there and then right here is where you start putting in the project information so the project information was this right here so this is your project information you can choose to show this or not show this is completely up to you if you didn't want that there I like it I like how kind of stands out visually so I like that a lot so anyways right here's where you put current phase next phase and the complete date nights your three boxes right so right here current phase next phase and then the completion date so when you're managing the various projects this right here is one of the aspects that you will actually be changing these two things here the current phase and the next phase for your client so this is where you the box that you would be on and so obvious and right here's where you can show this or not show this I like it but you might not want to show it is completely up to you you get the nice date box pop out when you click on estimated complete dates and so and anyways you're gone then there's this other kind of global aspect it's a call to action that appears at the bottom of the content pages and the login page for the client so by default you want to see all your files not the greatest call to action we see they have it here on the demo so here's that default call to actions you can have this called action be anything that makes sense to you maybe if you are web developer and you have care plans if you wanted to have some information here about getting different services or care plans from you here's that call to action that it's referring to right here so you can choose to not have it or have it it's completely up to you and so you can change the text you can change the button text and what happens when someone clips clicks on that button so so far we have covered how you do this part right here and we've covered how you do this part in this part and all that's left now is the phases in in between those areas so that's going to be right actually looks like you need to save it before you can do that and this is actually a perfect chance for me to go to the project that I've already created so when you click right here to all project shall see Alyssa your projects and you can see that I've already created a project and I want to show you this here right now that when you hover over the name of the project what's nice is you get some options get the option to just duplicate this project so that's one way of going about getting new projects set up in the system really quick you could just click on duplicate the other one right here is that as mentioning is you can convert a project into a template and this is really good for basically setting up your put your projects a lot faster so you have these two options here some go ahead and click on into this one so I didn't do a ton to it so let me just show you it right now so I I didn't change the color in the background I definitely want to do it I just grabbed a logo for umbrella corpse if you know what that is for her from what movie that's from let me know the comment section down below here is the name of the project so if I go here see name of the project and here is the name of the project I would assume if I didn't put a logo in here just show the name of the project here's that information right here you can see it's pulling the font styling from my theme that's why there are some gaps here are some spacing so I'd probably want to adjust that here are my phases that I've gone ahead and created the discovery design and I put it due date right there and I didn't get too much into customizing this but I'll show you how I added this and added multiple phases you can as many phases as you want you can make this say whatever you want you can change the icon you can have it do whatever you want and then here's that call to action right there so let's dig a little to actually before we dig into it a little deeper let me show you what happens when a client logs in a because this is a question that I had so I'm going to open up a incognito tab to just show you so let's go right there okay here's my incognito tabs is a incognito tablet not logged in so this is a link that every client of yours can use to log in so it will pull those same colors that you set up in the plug-in and so you see adding customize the blue or the red so here's a link you could put this to a menu item client login or something like that if you wanted to you could see doesn't have that same WordPress field which is was a concern of mine so I was happy to find this out right so you can give this have this link be on your website but with the plug and you can actually take it a little further so here is just switch tabs and you can see the logo appeared so what this is is if you give your client the link to the project if they tried to go to that link they're going to see a custom login with their logo and you can see the URL right here is the name of the project umbrella Corp. website right there and you can see this right here I love this I love this it's a custom branded login just for your client obviously wouldn't put this link in menu navigation you would use the generic one right here which is the URL/client portal login but I like that they took this extra step so that was something I really liked about it okay says go through this here so I just added the custom logo I then play around with this much I pop my phone number and email but if I had in the ClientPortal settings I would have had to do that again here's where I have my saddest discovery phase design phase my dates my Marcus completes I didn't mess in my call to action and now here are the phases so you can add as many of these as you want so I click on manage phases right here it's going to expand them all out like this and give me the option to add and reorder phases and remove phases so by default the can't comes of the discovery website and assets that's fine about right here I can add a new phase if I wanted to and then I can reorder these if I wanted to see you have that granular control over this and also right here was some options to make your project public or not this would mean there's no login or there's no password protection on it so it's just public on your website and that's how they did their support they just essentially made this a public project and so that was that right here and then here's where you would link a project to an account so only the person with this account when they login can actually access this project pretty cool okay so let me click on save and show modules okay so here we go scroll down again and here we have those three phases you can expand it like this here's another option for changing the name and then this is how you add and edit the various boxes you can see I have right here the getting started so if I click right here you can see I name the getting started and I put some text in their slot machine the anatomy of that real quick she can see what options you have just expand the existing one you give it a name you give it the little description now the description you're not gonna want to put too many words as you do not want this to take up too many lines when you look at their example here you can see how each one they make sure that just for it to be visually aesthetically pleasing you see how it only takes up two lines on each one sealed want to do something similar there okay so you put your description and you have your choice of icon and there is every icon under the sun right there is an option and this is where you would choose those three types of what you can have happen when someone clicks on this box you can have a go to URL you can have a go to uploaded files so URL would be if you want to link to a Google doc a trail aboard a proposal that might be a new C or better proposals or something like that upload files this would be if you wanted to upload bills invoices receipts or something along those lines and then content page would be to a be a page on the website that only this client can see so I first did the content page and right here you could it'll give you the option to create a new content page and you can click on edit to edit that particular content page so when I click on this it's going to go to a content page and input any content in it but you have a navigation here on the side and you have the content there just really nice the way that it looks and also let me show you there's also this logout button here on the top right that's available to you so or to your clients okay so that is that so you can easily click right here to add another module and you can put whatever information you wanted in there so if it's URL just pop the URL if it's upload files right here you can just upload multiple files and you can see that example what the user experience would be right here on their website it would just look beautiful and seamless like this I really like the way they implemented that where there's this nice pop up that comes up so you can also see in their example some interesting things that they did they put in a website questionnaire and this is interesting so what they did is they made this a content page when you click on it takes you to the content page and there's a form here I really like this I thought it was a great way of using it to have a form here so you kid when you get your client all set up in and ready to go you have them come in here and fill this out so you know what the heck you're going to be doing on their project if you have a discovery phase and definitely everybody should have a discovery phase and then you have other options here you can have the status active completed inactive so they all look a little different so for looking on their example right here you can see this is completed this is not completed in these two right here these are in active I really like how they do that so you would in this example here you have a style guide will you haven't even done that yet you don't even want it to be something they can click on but it's cool that they can see it and know that that's coming up soon so you have that granular control over it like that and that's pretty much the tool right here so I have a couple of pros and cons I just showed you not actually use but I wrote a couple pros and cons out his exit kinda hard to find some cons but the pros that it's as simple and lightweight it's not in a low debt load down our slow down and low down your WordPress website you can add it to your main website not worry about is you don't have to set up some other subdomain or something like that for this it's perfect to add to your website to provide a seamless experience for your clients you can create custom content pages I like that custom branded login I showed you that I love that was cool and you can use it use the project templates reminds me of one thing I forgot to show you the process of creating the actual client login account to do that in a sec as I wrap this up the cons there's no automation so this is all high touch stuff so there's no Xavier integration or automation or anything like that so these but it's a totally fine because these are projects that you're actually managing or having someone in your staff manage and so it's really reasonable that you have to go in there and upload the invoice and stuff like that so that's one negative the other negative or not, on earth it may be just the scholar thing to improve is that there's no like hooks to slip in any kind of upsell so this isn't like a sales tool I will get everything that you know if you have your client login it should also act as a sales tool so have there be some visual way of drawing your customer that's logging in eyeballs the something that maybe they can upgrade their care plan or maybe purchase an upsell or something like that if there is a way to integrate some kind of promotions into it and there just isn't actually so be nice if you could maybe when they login a hook something in up here or here I suppose you can use this call to action at the bottom but that's assuming that the organist scroll all the way down to the bottom so be needed they could figure out some way to turn this also into some form of the selling tool okay lastly I left this out this is what you have to do in order to start to finish it get your client login then step one add the new project so just I should you do that go to projects Craig new and do it on the template whatever you want to do then what you need to do is go to users so you would go to users you would create a new user like this and you're in a fill out the information this is gonna be your customers login or role there is a type called client that gets added so you would choose client and you probably don't want to uncheck this send user notification because it would be that default WordPress notification I would recommend doing that so what you want to do is fill this out get the information and then what you need to do is take that information and send an email to your client saying you know congratulations for coming on board here's your login and password to your custom ClientPortal I would give them the link to the actual portal project so they can see wow there is my logos there my colors my brands or however far you wanted to take it for them but then you have to link the user account to the project and that was super easy so once you created the user account you go here to ClientPortal click on into the project right here and there's going to be an option write down here where you can choose that user so it says client account she'll see all a list of the user accounts that are the client role type you'll see them all listed just select on it and now only that user without login will be a link to this project when they login 30 to see it right away and that's how you do it now if you read their support docs which I did for this video you read the support docs it says if you want to have multiple client logins for a particular project you can't do that and so yeah so when you go down here you notice I couldn't multi-select user accounts I can only choose one account and what they suggest in that scenario don't set a client account go here and use the native WordPress feature where you can set a password on any use of contents you would go right here you click on edit and you would choose a password protected enter a password and send that to them they won't get that custom branded login and all that kind of stuff but it'll work fine that way if you're working with a company with multiple

Channel: WPCrafter.com WordPress For Non-Techies

Views: 75,666

Keywords: client portal wordpress plugin, client portal plugin, client portal wordpress, clientportal review, client portal wordpress plugin review, how to make a client portal website

Id: VDP8VqzMkZc

Length: 32min 48sec (1968 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 23 2018