When I first started working on the Member & Event Management System (MEMS), my goal was simple: build an internal Salesforce application that could manage memberships, events, and registrations efficiently. But very quickly, a new requirement surfaced, external users needed access too.

Members needed to check their membership details. Event attendees wanted to view the events they had registered for. And everyone wanted a clean, branded interface without having to log into Salesforce itself.

That’s where Experience Cloud came into the picture.

This blog is a walk-through of what Experience Cloud really is, how I used it to build an external portal for MEMS, and how you can get started creating your own digital experience for any Salesforce application.

What is Experience Cloud ?

Salesforce Experience Cloud is Salesforce’s way of letting you build websites for external users. These aren’t random public websites, they’re secure, branded portals where people can log in and interact with specific Salesforce data you choose to expose.

Think of platforms like:

• A members-only portal
• A customer login dashboard
• A help center
• A partner community

Experience Cloud lets you build all of this on top of Salesforce, using your existing objects, records, and automation. No code. No backend setup. Just configuration.

Experience Builder — the place where you actually design the site

While Experience Cloud is the overall capability, Experience Builder is the actual drag-and-drop interface where you design your site.

If you’ve ever worked with WordPress, Elementor, Webflow, or Wix, you’ll feel right at home here. You can:

• Add text, lists, buttons
• Insert record lists and detail views
• Create menus and navigation
• Add branding
• Choose page layouts

And every change you make updates instantly on a preview of your site. It’s the perfect blend of simplicity and power.

Digital Experiences — the umbrella term

Inside Salesforce Setup, everything related to Experience Cloud sits under Digital Experiences. This includes:

• Enabling Experience Cloud
• Creating sites
• Managing their URLs
• Controlling access

Every portal you create becomes a “Digital Experience”.

A quick look at the MEMS application

Before I walk you through the site I built, here’s the Salesforce application behind it.

The Member & Event Management System (MEMS) is a Salesforce application that manages:

• Memberships
• Events
• Registrations
• Optional invoices
• Optional breakout sessions

Internally, I built:

• Custom objects
• Record types
• Flows and automations
• Validation rules
• A security model
• Reports and dashboards

The internal system took care of operational tasks. But an external audience, members and event attendees, needed a way to interact with their own data.

Enter the portal.

Building the MEMS External User Portal with Experience Builder

I created an Experience Cloud site using the Customer Account Portal template. This template is great for authenticated users and already comes with login, profile, and navigation components built in.

The portal I built contained four main pages:

1. Home

A simple, friendly welcome page with a short description of MEMS and quick links to the user’s membership and registrations.

2. Events

A page showing all published events. Users can click into any event to see more details.

3. Membership Details

A personalized page showing the logged-in user’s membership record, type, validity, status, and relevant info.

4. Registrations

A list of events the user has already registered for, along with statuses.

For the UI, I relied on:

• Headings
• HTML blocks
• The navigation menu
• Global search
• The user profile menu
• Record list components

The result was a clean, modern portal that external users could log into and navigate intuitively.

So how can you build your own Experience Cloud site?

If you’ve never worked with Experience Cloud, it may look intimidating at first, but it’s surprisingly straightforward once you understand the flow.

Here’s the high-level journey:

You start by enabling Experience Cloud in Setup. You choose a template, Customer Account Portal is a solid starting point. Salesforce creates a website for you automatically. You open it in Experience Builder. And then you begin customizing:

• Adding pages
• Designing layouts
• Choosing a theme
• Dragging components
• Configuring access
• Publishing it for your users

The beauty of Experience Builder is how visual it is. You can design a page in minutes. Themes let you pick the look and feel, colors, fonts, buttons, headers. Components let you drop in record lists, record details, buttons, forms, search boxes, or custom text.

If you want a professional-looking external portal backed by Salesforce data, this is one of the easiest ways to build it.

Why Experience Cloud matters

In today’s world, users expect self-service. They don’t want to email support for basic things like checking their membership type or viewing event details.

Experience Cloud allows businesses of all sizes to provide:

• Secure logins
• Personalized dashboards
• Data-driven portals
• A seamless link between your Salesforce backend and your external audience

For the MEMS project, this meant event attendees and members finally had a clean, simple platform to view their own data, controlled, authenticated, and synced with Salesforce in real time.

Final thoughts

The MEMS portal was one of the most practical parts of the entire project. It tied together Salesforce object modeling, security, automation, and user experience, all inside a real-world digital portal.

If you’re building a Salesforce application today, think about how your external users might interact with it. Experience Cloud gives you everything you need to create a custom website that feels modern, branded, and connected directly to your Salesforce data.

And once you’ve built one portal, you’ll start imagining possibilities for many more.