Design a Web Portal which Convert and Combine PDFs using API

If you need to create a portal, web application or website that will allow you to upload, convert and combine PDFs from scratch, follow the following steps.

1. Register a domain

• Do some research and find a good domain registrar.
• Find a domain name of your choice to allow access to your portal.
• Buy the domain name. If you want to set up a serious business or service, register the domain name for more than one year. Registering your domain for more than one year is good for 2 main reasons:
  • It is more economical to register a domain for a longer period and
  • Search engines like Google will trust your site/portal more.

2. Which tools will you use to put content online?

• Your options are to use:
  • A Content Management System like WordPress or Drupal,
  • A framework like Ruby on Rails or
  • Do all the coding from scratch.
• You could delegate this choice to a web developer as long as you are clear about what you want your outcome to be. Let the developer choose the tools that will best suit your project.
• Another important criterion for choosing your tools is that you should be able to maintain the implementation of your project after the developer has finished the project and is not available to you.

3. Hosting your portal online

• Get a hosting service. Ideally, most domain registrars have a hosting service that they offer as a package with domain registration.
• Do some research to find out the best hosting service to suit your specific needs.

4. Design the portal

• Unless your web developer is also a good web designer, you need to find someone with proven web design skills.
• Good web design will ensure that your portal looks aesthetically pleasing and that your portals users will have a good user experience.
• Depending on the media devices that your portal users will use for your PDF application, a good web designer makes sure that the portal is utilizable on different media devices like smartphones, tablets or PCs as the case may be. He/she should have responsive web design skills.

5. Get an API with the functionality you need

You could choose to let a web developer create all the functionality that you need for your PDF, but it may be easier to use a tried and tested service.

In this case, integrating an already created API into your portal may be the easier choice.

You can use several APIs to do the PDF tasks that you need. Below is an example of one such application that you can use called Easy PDF Server.

This service includes 2 APIs:

• PDF Printer API, which can convert most documents into a PDF and
• PDF Processor API, which can split, merge, rotate, delete, extract and optimize a PDF

You have several choices for how you can design a portal that can manipulate PDFs; this is just one straightforward approach you can take.