Strategies for successful portal design

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Strategies for successful portal design

 

This article originally appeared as a Design and Usability Tactics e-newsletter.

 

By Jim Kukral

 

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.comis a comprehensive leader in online subject matter, covering more than 50,000 topics.
• Yahooserves 237 million users in 25 countries and 13 languages. Yahoo also offersenterprise portal solutions, an information portal that enables companies to communicate and interact directly with employees, customers, and shareholders over a secure, scalable platform.

Jim Kukral has spent the last seven years working in the trenches of Web design, development, and usability for Fortune 500 clients as well as mom-and-pop companies.

 

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자슥이 당연한 얘기 졸라 어렵게(영어니까.. ㅜ_ㅜ) 써놧당..쩝..

User Experience Design의 가장 기초적인 적용사항인

좋은 포털 사이트의 디자인에서는 해당 컨텐츠의 대한 구체적인 설명을 기술해준다거나

컨텐츠를 잘 분류하여 적저히 Grouping해 놨다거나 Navigation이나 Directory 분류에 대한 얘기와

컨텐츠 및 사이트의 개인화에 대한 내용이다.

다 알고 있는 얘기지 않은가? 흠... 참내 분석이라 하기엔 영....

 

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