Ecommerce Web Site Design Portal

Building a portal site: a practical guide to portal creation software.

Building a Portal

The ecommerce web site design portal you'll build depends on your intentions. Though portals are simply doorways on the Internet that bring together sites and services organized about some common theme, they differ widely in the areas they address (local community, interest group, commercial activity or market sector) and the additional features they supply — discussion forum, surveys, expertise directories, etc.

Marketing is critical, as income derives from directory listing and/or site advertising.

Ecommerce Web Site Design Portals

Some portals are little more than a few pages with multiple website listings, and these obviously need no special portal software to build. Pages are typically pared down to essentials: simple listings, graphics kept to a minimum for quick downloads. News and free offers are obtained cheaply or free by arrangement with other sites, and site maintenance revolves round marketing.

Marketing is indeed the key requirement. Companies won't pay decent advertising rates until site traffic is very appreciable, and site traffic won't grow until the portal offers what visitors cannot find elsewhere.

Portal owners generally solve this Catch 22 situation by engaging in massive advertising and by charging only nominal rates for advertising until the site catches on.

The second concern is the hosting platform. Sites receiving tens of thousands of hits per day won't survive on virtual servers shared with other sites. Dedicated or in-house servers are the order of the day, with all the maintenance costs of employing expert IT staff. Research your market niche carefully before buying portal software: it's these other aspects for which you'll need deep pockets.

Portal Types

In order of increased cost and difficulty in setting up, your options are:

• 1. add portal features to an existing ecommerce site, e.g.:

• targeted emails

• surveys

• newsletters

• discussion boards

• chat pages

• calendars of events

• resource directories

• free software or services

• 2. rent an ecommerce portal. The package should allow you:

• full control over appearance and makeup of site

• unlimited directories and subdirectories, with access control

• control over search-engine attractiveness of individual pages

• foreign language versions if required

• facilities for visitors to rate content

• facilities for banner ads, including rotation manager

• full control over facilities listed above, i.e.:

  • emails

  • surveys

  • discussion boards

  • chat pages

  • resource directories

  • free software or service libraries

  • newsletters

• 3. use a commercial package to build an ecommerce portal with the features listed above. Host on your own or a dedicated server.

• 4. use a commercial package to build a customer relationship management portal with these facilities:

  • directory of customers:

    • contact and company details

    • customer feedback

    • company turnover, history and terms applying

    • purchase history

    • employee handling account

  • inventory control

    • order tracker

    • inventory control

    • supplies tracker

  • directory of suppliers

    • contact and company details

    • company turnover, history and terms applying

    • supply history

    • employee handling account

• 5. use a commercial package to build an information portal providing these facilities:

  • directory of customers as above

  • inventory control as above

  • directory of suppliers as above

  • public relations and marketing

    • press releases

    • annual reports

    • faqs

    • company events

    • customer surveys

    • marketing reports

    • ad tracking

  • customer services

    • feedback

    • surveys

    • problem ticketing and management

  • human resources

    • employee details

    • directory of skills and experience

    • positions vacant

  • office management

    • responsibilities and company procedures

    • room/meeting scheduling

    • departmental faqs

  • warehouse control

    • inventories

    • supply chain management

    • order placement and tracking

• 6. build from scratch (i.e. code yourself) an information portal with the features listed above.

Packages for options 3, 4 and 5 will need the facilities listed in option 2.

Option 1 is not difficult to build, and many all-in web hosting companies will supply the features at little extra cost.

Options 3 to 5 are onerous undertakings, and option 6 obviously requires a strong IT department. In fact, some 40% of all portals may be built with specialized platform software shortly, and our resources page lists the major players.

You should also be aware that:

• 'portal' has become a buzzword and the term can now mean almost anything.

• information portals often require major restructuring of company procedures, when benefits may be slow to appear.

• boundaries between various types (including vortal or vertical portal) are somewhat blurred, and there is little to distinguish information portals from large corporation extranets.

• you can outsource portal building to Application Service Suppliers, but a recent Gartner report suggest that many deals are not viable.

Information / Content Management Portals

Large corporations commonly amass enormous quantities of information that is needed on a day to day basis. Portal software to build such sites is listed in our resources section.

Advanced Ecommerce Portals

Also listed on our resources page are customer relationship management portals because a major ecommerce company usually wishes to integrate ecommerce into a wider IT strategy. Indeed, by starting from scratch, the usual problems of information portals — incompatible formats, conversion to electronic format, departmental rivalry, who does what questions — can be largely avoided.

The resources page is organized under approaches to building portal sites, with and without special portal software. Consult our e-book for more detailed listings on ecommerce web site design portals.

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