Top 5 features of Power Pages from Power Apps Portal UI/UX pro

I am very excited to share my initial thoughts about Power Pages and a new portal designer. It was a big announcement at MS Build today, if you missed it you can read the article here and then set up a trial to start playing with Power Pages.

I’ve been working as a Dynamics 365 portal and Power Apps portal developer for many years. Recently, I made UI/UX for Power Apps portals one of my business directions. Because it’s not easy to find good portal developers but it’s even harder to find someone who could make a Power Apps portal look “pretty”

It’s understandable that a new Power Pages designer doesn’t have all the functionality available just yet. However, even with the preview functionality, we’ve got many features that would make my life as a pro UI/UX designer so much easier. For developers and users who aren’t pro designers – you don’t need my services anymore 😉, you can just do it yourselves.

Themes

One of the main things in any portal design is a theme. Usually, a portal theme comes from some strict marketing style and branding documents for government organizations and not-so-strict marketing branding documents for other companies. That type of document may contain a font, colors, palette for normal text, lists, headers, and some design suggestions and guidance for designers to ensure consistency across websites developed.

This is why Styling is a super useful and practical area for you to start with after choosing a portal template. Here you can set up your foundation for your text, headers, links, and even buttons. I am sure this area will be evolving quickly and we’ll see more features coming soon.

Landing page

A landing page is something a designer spends a significant amount of time on. The great-looking landing page creates wow-effect which keeps a customer excited. It will be the place for your users to start their days. It has to look great, almost perfect!

Using a Power Pages Landing page feature will give you a good start. The layout is good, really good.

Just add your hero image or other blocks with splits in between – done!

Image uploads

Adding images as Web files was a nightmare! With the editor, you can add an image as a page component. Anywhere, literally!

Forms and lists

I love this one badly! You can easily add any Dataverse table form as a basic form to your page. No extra steps, it will auto-create a Basic form in the system.

You don’t need to leave a designer to change permissions or add extra form fields. Everything in one place!

Adding lists to the page is also super-easy!

And more magic!

HTML editor

As I mentioned, the visual editor may not have all the features just yet so having an option to manually dig into a code is super handy.

To summarise, Microsoft did a great job improving a UI/UX editor for a portal. With new Power Pages, you could build “pretty” portals easily. No designer super skills are required.