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What is a Portal and Why Should I Want One?
Everyone seems to want to build a portal site these days. Portals are hot! Everywhere you turn around the word is mentioned, but who knows what it really means? Then there are the variations: B2B Portals, B2C Portals, Vortals, Corporate Portals, and Community Portals.
The Basics
Let's start with the basics. The dictionary defines portal this way:
Portal (pôrtl) noun
1. A doorway, an entrance, or a gate, especially one that is large and imposing.
2. An entrance or a means of entrance: the local library, a portal of knowledge.
An Internet portal is an entrance as well. It's a place to go to find a wide range of services, content and commerce offerings in one convenient location.
The first sites to be called portal sites were the early search engine and directory sites such as Yahoo, Excite, MSN, and AOL. These sites started simply, but soon became a central gathering point where you could find a huge array of resources and services.
Today portals offer search engines; email; customised news, weather, sports; planners, calendars, and contact managers, chat; discussion forums, external content on a wide range of topics and e-commerce just to name a few. Portals have exploded into a massive market, with size estimates in the tens of billions of dollars.
What sets Portals apart from an ordinary corporate web?
A year or two back it was fashionable to have a web presence. With beautiful graphics and fancy design work, with the one trying to outdo the other with slow downloading pictures. Companies published their Mission and Vision Statements (in case there was one or two people interested in corporate talk), the statutory Contact Us (usually detail you could find in any telephone directory), About Us (in case you did not know what the company did).
Later some content masquerading in the form of News was added, or the latest stock figures (one soon discovered that the info had not been updated regularly because it was a pain to do so) and some attempt at useful “other” information, links or gimmicks such as financial calculators etc.
All this worked fine in quieting the corporate conscience until a survey showed that of 850 board members and directors surveyed, 78% did not know what their company’s web address was and a staggering 93% had never bothered to look at their own site in a year!
Portals should be the answer to the perplexing problem of “updating” and supplying fresh content. The reason is that it now becomes part of the communications and marketing armory. Why? It now affords two-way communication between the company and their users.
Users, (or employees, members or the public etc.) are now empowered to contribute, comment and request information, order products and obtain advice, live online. A portal needs to be backed up with fresh content daily. It becomes what the name implies – a portal to information.
Allowing online admin and changes, this information can be supplied and updated by anyone, from anywhere and is available online immediately.
Variations
Some people define portals very narrowly, but the truth is that there are many variations. A vortal is a variation that means a "vertical industry portal." An example would be a site such as RealEstate.com for real estate information or MD.com for finding a doctor. Other variations include B2B or B2C portals, which refer to business-to-business portals and business to consumer portals respectively.
Corporate portals provide a single place for company employees to find information and resources and do it very cost effectively. Community portals are centered on a specific interest or geographic location, club or speciallity subject.
How can my organisation benefit from creating and setting up a portal site?
You don't have to be a Fortune 500 company to benefit from the community-based benefits that portals provide. Portals provide the 1:1 personalisation that strengthens collaboration, builds loyalty, and boosts profitability for any size web site.
Organisations create portal sites to:
- Reduce Costs - Tools such as chat and discussion forums can result in significant manpower cost savings in areas such as meetings and customer support.
- Increase E-Commerce Revenue - CD-Now reports that return visitors buy 150 % more product than first-time visitors. Members of a community are 36% more likely to buy than non-members, according to Forrester Research.
- Create Viral Marketing - Online communities create members that put their own energy and enthusiasm into helping build your organisation faster.
- Enhance Customer Loyalty - Members of a community are more loyal to and remain customers of an organisation up to 50 % longer than people who are not members.
- Create close ties with customers - Online communities naturally create strong links with your best customers. Your customers visit your site more frequently and interact with you more quickly which enhances the quality of communications
- Share Information – community tools provide a cost-effective method for getting information to your audience.
- Collect Consumer Feedback - Communities provide an opportunity to know how your customers feel about your products and services. It also allows you to monitor trends, and learn more about the how your customers change over time.
- Generate Valuable Content - Through your visitor's contributions to discussion groups, chat sessions, comments, and the data created by daily use of community resources, you can automatically generate more value for members as the community creates its own relevant and authentic content.
- Help Customers Connect - Forty percent of visitors to a web site want to connect with other visitors to discuss the site’s content, services, and products, according to Jupiter Communications
You probably won't build a general-purpose portal site. Yahoo, Excite and AOL have a good head start in that market, however you may find that a vertical portal (vortal) or a business to business site with portal features can generate the reduced costs, increased revenue, customer loyalty, viral marketing and content that you are looking for.
A portal consist of a set of software programs (modules) that makes it easy to own a powerful, portal site that can include all or any number of the following modules:
- Chat Rooms
- Discussion Forums (Moderated)
- Advertising Management
- Directory Services (database driven)
- Membership Services (Management)
- User Level & Permission Management
- Online Forums
- PM – Personal messaging
- Classified Ads
- Job Listings
- Personal & Public Calendar
- Personal Planner
- Contact Manager
- Article Publishing
- Picture Gallery
- Event Calendar
- Link Management
- News Syndication (RSS Feeds)
- E-Commerce (PayPal etc.)
- External Content
- Instant Survey & Polls
- E-Mail Manager (Newsletter Campaigns)
- Newsletter Publisher (Cut & paste from MS Word, Online Editor)
- Instant Messaging
- SMS from database
- Upload & download Files
- FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions)
- Knowledge Base (Data Repository)
- Help Desk
- Different Languages applied (i.e. Change portal language to Zulu, German, etc.)
- “Skins” colours or look and feel that can be changed
- Online “Back-End” Management and Administration
What sets a good portal aside from the run of the mill HTML style web presence sites is the ability to have a fully managed “back-end”. The Admin or Super Admin can administrate all of the modules listed above. They can be switched on, moved around on the pages, menus can be created, forums, members etc. can be moderated and controlled, all online through easy to use admin pages and forms!
Check out the sample screens in the article included
This will give you an overview: Some screen shots are included. It must be remembered tha there are hundreds of designs and colours available so any one screen could be arranged in hundreds of ways and changed to reflect your businesss or corporate image and style.
Online Administration The strongest case for using portals is the fact that they have an Online Administration “Back End”. This ensures full control by the client in administering Users, Polls, Forums, Modules, etc.
OK, so I am interested, tell me more
Our portal offerings are based on the specific need of for instance a church, school, SME or Corporate. We employ and combine, where available, parts of open source modules and code and even commercial modules. It all depends on what is required. We pay the licenses, not you. It is because of using this content design model that we do not sell you a program but rather lease or rent to you an online facility at a fixed monthly cost. Our years of experience have shown that it is in the support and training of people to use the software effectively, where the problem lies. Our contract with you, therefore, include regular advice and training as well as a help desk and forums (through our own portal of course) that will ensure that your portal is maintained and used to the fullest extent.
Give us a call - let us show you how you can benefit from a Portal.
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