When you design an informational Web site
for a specific audience, you're building a portal. Some types of
portals include displays for a Web phone, an e-marketplace, or an
intranet.
While I won't
be able to touch upon every aspect of good portal design in this
column, it's possible to discuss a 30,000-foot view of powerful,
useful portal design.
Implementing good portal
design
In general, all
portals contain similar functionalities that allow the user to
collaborate and utilize the available content and applications.
The manner in which you implement these functions will affect the
usefulness and quality of the finished portal design.
Here are
several functionalities and characteristics that define skillfully
designed portals:
Subscriptions
to content and groups
Portals with specific target audiences
often create subscriptions for online content that is distributed
to specific groups of users. The expert content solidifies the
legitimacy of the portal and provides the user with an excellent
experience for the portal brand.
Organization
and taxonomy
Defining factors in the successfulness
of any portal design are whether the portal is properly organized
into content groups and whether the content is easy to find and
read. Therefore, you might carefully plan a portal's navigation
and directory structure in advance. Failure to organize can spell
disaster for information-rich portal sites.
Personalization
Strong portals allow users to
personalize their settings. Personalization can be anything from a
custom start-up page or custom directory on login to an automatic
notification of new content within a specific group.
Content is king
Portals are
only as good as the content they provide. So, regardless of how
well you serve up the content through a good portal design, if the
content isn't valuable to the visitors, you still fail.
I also think
it's important to make it easier for authors and editors to
publish content themselves. That said, I recommend building a
content management solution (CMS) into your portal design. A good
CMS system puts the power of the content publishing into the hands
of the actual authors and editors.
Examples of successful
portal design
Here are two
sites that have portal design down pat.
- About.com
is a comprehensive leader in online subject matter, covering
more than 50,000 topics.
- Yahoo
serves 237 million users in 25 countries and 13 languages.
Yahoo also offers enterprise
portal solutions, an information portal that enables
companies to communicate and interact directly with employees,
customers, and shareholders over a secure, scalable platform.
