Best Practices for Client Portals

Im getting ready to re-develope a friends website but he wants a portal for clients to be able to login and see their project status or at the very least photos of his work in the process or in a final state. Too many details, I know.

However, I’m not sure of what the best practices are for this. I was planning on doing his site in HTML/CSS due to how small it is but I wasn’t sure how I should approach the client portal part. He of course wants to be able to manage the portal himself including setting up seperate pages for his clients.

My initial thought was that ASP.net might have something.

Any thoughts???

-Clueless.:rd: