Dollie is near-perfect for selling cloud products to customers on a recurring basis using WordPress. It’s a flexible app that will serve agencies, WordPress product creators, and more. One reason for this is its potential to help you with client portal creation. These hub pages are all-important: they’re how your clients manage their relationships and transactions with you – so you need to make them faultless.
In this article, we’ll cover client portal creation with Dollie’s Hub Builder. First off, we’ll give you a general overview. However, from there, we’ll cover the key features, benefits, and how to begin to use the Hub Builder for your own needs.
Introduction to Dollie’s Hub Builder
Dollie is one of the leading Websites as a Service (WaaS) platforms that also runs on WordPress. Because it uses the number one Content Management System (CMS) on the market, Dollie leverages all of the flexibility and power of WordPress. However, the Hub Builder lets you do so without the security and scalability issues of using (for example) WordPress Multisite.
We cover all of the general details of Dollie in a dedicated review. However, the Hub Builder warrants further attention.
What is Dollie’s Hub Builder?
The Hub Builder does what it says on the tin. It lets you create client hubs or portals for the cloud products and services you sell. For the client, they get to see a beautiful dashboard that includes full details on their sites, billing, additional services, and anything else relevant to their experience.
We’ll look at the Hub Builder’s key features with more focused attention later. However, you have near-seamless integration with WordPress through plugins, and can extend it based on your own needs. To solidify your branding, you can also white-label everything within Dollie and customize it to your own requirements.
Of course, you also get to leverage a similar set of features to Control HQ – Dollie’s proprietary site management dashboard. However, there are plenty more benefits to the Hub Builder that we’ll touch on later with greater depth.
Key Features of Dollie’s Hub Builder
In general, the Hub Builder is the way you’ll undertake client portal creation for your cloud products. However, there are specific features and functionality that makes the Hub Builder shine.
Because Dollie builds on the strong core of WordPress, you also get seamless integration between the two platforms. This comes in the form of a plugin, which lets you work with Dollie through the WordPress dashboard.
However, this extends to client portal creation. You’re also able to install WordPress plugins to help you sell products and services, create your hub using a dedicated page builder, and much more.
In fact, as you can build a whole site within WordPress, you can achieve the same with the Hub Builder on the WordPress dashboard. Simply head to Dollie Hub > Settings > Pages to remind yourself of the existing pages, then open it to edit:
Your hub design also extends to the branding you showcase. Dollie lets you white-label the whole presentation. You have full control over the design, color schemes, product pricing, and what data your clients can access. This is crucial, as you can finally monetize hosting alongside your typical maintenance, site support, and one-off services.
This feature-rich experience also extends to site management for you too. You get a dedicated dashboard from which you can see all of the essential client sales and site status data. This includes a comprehensive overview of all of the sites you host, access controls for services, flexibility for upsells, and much more.
The Benefits of Using Dollie’s Hub Builder
Reading up to here so far, it’s quick to see what using the Hub Builder can do for your business, sites, and clients. However, let’s try and sum up what the core perks are for using it.
We already talk about how you’ll own your data, and can do whatever you like with it to improve your business. However, there are a multitude of other areas where the Hub Builder can assist you:
- You’ll be able to monetize more than just typical client services. For instance, you could set up dedicated hosting that isn’t based on reseller setups.
- You’re using the foundation of WordPress to build up your own client portals and services. This includes the fundamental functionality through the same plugins you use to run your main site.
- Speaking of which, you can also use the same page building tools to develop your client portal. This could be WordPress’ Site Editor, a plugin such as Elementor, or something else entirely.
All of this (and more) is possible with the the same security you get from WordPress, in addition to extra functionality from Dollie. For instance, you have access group controls, security scans, uptime checks, activity monitoring, and much more.
However, the Hub Builder is also easy to use, and straightforward to customize. For the rest of the article, we’ll look at what this entails.
Dollie’s Hub Builder in Action
There are plenty of real-world successes that use the Hub Builder to grow, expand, and thrive in specific industries. Let’s look at two, along with how you’d achieve the same tasks with the Hub Builder.
Change Digital
For example, Change Digital help customers create political campaigns using WordPress. However, they moved from a setup using Flywheel to Dollie – and the Hub Builder is a central component.
[IMAGE change-digital]
With the Hub Builder, the company were able to remove manual and time-intensive processes such as site setup, WordPress installations, template creation, customer care, and more. In its place, the Hub Builder let Change Digital install plugins such as Gravity Forms to create a customized onboarding process.
This is possible from the Manage Your Hub > Manage > Plugins screen. Here, you’re able to check out the status, the version number on your site, the current version available, and buttons to turn on auto-updating, enable activation, and deleting the plugin.
You’re also able to install plugins from the Hub Builder too, direct from the WordPress Plugin Directory:
It’s the same situation with themes, and WordPress’ core. This put the entire process in the customer’s hands. They could use an individual white-label portal to manage their site, without further access to the WordPress dashboard.
TronBuilder
Website builder platform TronBuilder obfuscates lots of technical WordPress setup steps to provide a streamlined experience. In a nutshell, the user should be able to pick a theme, launch it, connect a domain name, and go live.
Without the flexibility of the Hub Builder (and Dollie’s Private Cloud), none of the sleek experience would be possible. Using Dollie’s blueprints lets you specify theme options as the client creates a site:
From here to live takes only a matter of a couple of minutes at most. At the end, you have a full-featured website ready to customize further. A client can manage everything based on your own dashboard or portal design:
You can include or obfuscate any information here. For instance, our example includes resource usage, but you don’t have to depending on your needs. With the adaptability and freedom available, you can create the exact experience, funnel, or workflow you require for your products and services.
Conclusion
Dollie’s whole experience centers around the Control HQ, Private Cloud, and the focus of this piece – the Hub Builder. It’s this technology that links the cloud and the dashboard, so it’s vital that you understand how to leverage its feature set.
In a nutshell, the Hub Builder is key for client portal creation. It’s how you sell recurring cloud products alongside a suitable WordPress e-commerce platform. Hub pages are straightforward to create, design, and extend. What’s more, you get to keep all of the data you collect – a boon for your site’s safety, security, and trust.
Do you see Dollie as the way you undertake client portal creation for your site? Come and share your thoughts with us in the comments section below!
Keep reading the article at WP Mayor. The article was originally written by Tom Rankin on 2023-10-11 07:00:00.
The article was hand-picked and curated for you by the Editorial Team of WP Archives.