An online platform or portal; we hear about it all the time, but what exactly is it? In short, it is online software that generates value by facilitating interaction between different parties. The possibilities are endless. It's not just about offering different products (like Bol.com, where they cleverly bundle different suppliers), but also about offering a platform for exchanging services (like Uber) or facilitating payments (like 'Tikkie').
What is an online platform?
Online services with endless possibilities
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Our experience with custom platforms
The challenges of a successful platform
In our portfolio you'll find plenty of cases where we've added value with software that we've developed for our clients. Below you'll find two examples that have an important common ground. Both systems contain all kinds of integrated and automated functionalities, where everything is in one interface. Because no matter how complicated a system is, it must always remain user-friendly.
At 10KB, we develop digital platforms every day. For example, we developed various web applications for BigSpark. They manage platforms that attract thousands of visitors every week. Our challenge is to develop software that does not lose performance with this amount of traffic, but at the same time is advanced enough to answer all the visitor's requests.
Some companies know exactly what they want and what it should look like. At Brainstud they understands dynamic training. They wanted a platform for their online learning modules. We know how to implement this into an interactive E-Learning platform that is easy to expand. Due to our experience with React, it is now relatively easy to tailor different environments to Brainstud's customers.
Whitepaper: The challenges of software outsourcing
When you’ve decided that your company is in need of a custom portal, you will be faced with a mountain of options. You’ll probably have a lot of questions like: Shall we choose for in house development or are we hiring an external agency? How do I find a party with expertise without paying too much? Do I prefer fast programmers or am I looking for quality? And how do you actually assess the quality of a developer? Especially with software that is essential for your business processes, a wrong choice can cause a lot of headache; like extra costs, safety risks and/or quality problems. Picking a reliable developer is therefore not an easy task. We wrote a whitepaper (in Dutch) in which we list different options of software outsourcing. It’s filled with various advantages and disadvantages of all of these options to help you prevent (costly) mistakes. This way you can always make a responsible choice for the outsourcing (or not) of your platform.
Download the do's en don'ts of development outsourcing
Online platform development according to 10KB
A sum of web development techniques
To achieve this, we use all the tools we have in our development toolbox. Think of Elixir, Node.js and ElasticSearch. But do you want your digital platform to really function as a business? Then the underlying architecture of the software will also have to be looked at. The speed and efficiency of a platform stands or falls with that. User-friendliness is always ultimately reflected in the figures.
What does that optimal application architecture look like? There is of course no clear-cut answer for custom software, but what we can tell you in advance is: the more structured, the better. That is why we like to work with APIs, because they enable us to link all parts of the application (frontend, backend, databases and other existing systems) together as separate blocks. This makes the software, in combination with DevOps, scalable and therefore sustainable for the future.
What does a custom platform cost?
The more we know, the better we can assess that
Giving a general indication of the development costs of a platform is no mean feat. This is because those costs depend on many things. Which functionalities should your platform have? If it is only a platform where people can contact each other, you're not going to pay as much as you whould when you need a gigantic interactive platform with payment modules, search engines and many interactive elements.
In addition, you also need to consider what requirements you set for your software. How important is speed, scalability, security and/or the ability to extend features? The better you know what you expect from your software and what it needs to do in the future, the better we can tell you approximately how much it will cost.
