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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.

Slapaddicts designs and develops web sites in Manchester UK.
Find out more about Web Design in Manchester from Slapaddicts