How Web Portals Have Invaded the Internet Market

Intro

Many of you, probably, have not only heard of such a concept as "web portals", but have also been visitors and readers of such resources. And today, the Digiteum** **company will consider the topic of portal web development and its features. First of all, let's consider what a portal is.

What are web portals?

Let's start our article with the definition of a web portal. This is practically the same as an Internet site, on which many links to other resources are placed. Also, the function of the portal includes concentrating on the target interested audience. That is, the web portal performs some functions, and the website performs other functions. No matter what the web portal is - informational, or educational, it quickly attracts users due to the large amount of information that is structured, concentrated, and placed in the most convenient way for familiarization.

Functionality of the portal

And it's time to talk about the advantages that web portals give your business. Web portals have the advantages of intranets in that they can provide a more user-specific view. For example, a company's web portal may provide individualized, specific content that is available to us based on our role (for example, department, employee, administrator, or manager).

These roles are required by the portal to determine our rights to read, search, update, add feeds, and personalize content. The web portal uses information stored in roles to provide an appropriate selection of content and services. We can then organize the content more specifically ourselves, choosing from personalized materials and services. As a result, the portal works as we want and gives you business a profit.

Types of web portals

Two types of web portals help us shape our company's work: vertically or horizontally.

• Vertical web portals focus on a specific application or business function, such as HR, accounting and finance, CRM, ERP, administration, or warehouse management. This allows users both inside and outside of our company to view, edit, and contribute to the processes in that particular application.

For example, an organization may want to provide a web-based customer portal that allows suppliers to view, add, or change order status details and other relevant information.

• Horizontal web portals allow users to view aggregated data from multiple applications on a single screen. With this type of web portal, users do not need to log into multiple core business applications to read, write, or merge information. This can greatly improve our performance and productivity.

A shared horizontal web portal can take the form of a KPI (key performance indicator) management reporting system that presents information from multiple business systems.

In what cases is it relevant to create a portal?

The portal can be useful in any field or industry. If you have a significant amount of knowledge in a certain area, which, moreover, is not represented widely enough in the Internet space, then consider that you have found your niche to apply for the services of **portal support and web development **to professionals such as Digiteum. You can safely order to make a site of this type in your region and develop in this direction. And you have to remember that there are a lot of ways to earn money on portals, which is explained by the high number of users, a whole article can be devoted to the discussion of this topic.

Portals are often the main way of internet representation for large companies. If the organization or company has a large number of representative offices throughout the country or in one region, then it makes sense to create a corporate portal. It will be the same as a corporate site, but with great functionality, and the resource itself will be of considerable volume. Portals can be both small, corporate, narrowly themed, and large.

Another difference between portals, which is quite logical and natural, is their high development cost, so not all companies provide similar services. So, for example, the development of a large and extensive portal for a technology company will be much more expensive than the development of a news portal.

Both the creation and promotion of portal sites have their own nuances and features. After all, it is necessary to attract a significant number of visitors in a short period of time, to make the resource interesting and useful, which requires hard work.

What to expect from portals in the future

Currently, portals are essentially becoming a means of combining business processes within an enterprise with the business processes of partners and clients. In reality, future portals will be able to perform the function of integrating applications and data, which is necessary for successful interaction with partners and clients.

Portal functionality will also be significantly impacted by support for mobile devices, which will enable users to utilize them in place of desktop computers and have continuous access to the services they offer. It is worth noting that a prevalent trend in portal creation is the incorporation of information content management technologies, which facilitate the implementation of functions such as aggregation within the site.

Technology-wise, portals should make use of the features that modern application servers and database management systems have to offer, particularly support for application integration technologies like XML Web services. It also appears that portal support and web development under modern standards is something we can look forward to.

Conclusion

In general, the creation of Internet portals is a rather long process, and the speed of execution of each of its stages almost directly depends on the quality of interaction between the customer and the contractor. For example, the duration of development can be significantly reduced if the customer provides the executor with the necessary materials for work on time, affirms the intermediate results of the work, and is always ready for dialogue. And at the same time, development terms increase if there are delays in providing materials to fill the portal, as well as in making decisions based on intermediate work results.