Portals are explicitly used on the World Wide Web to render personalised capabilities to all the viewers giving information about a apecific content and a pathway. They were initially designed to use varied applications to provide services from a many locations or any part of the world.
When intially, in later part of 1990s, Web portal came into existence, they were like only talked about in technical and commercial coomunities. After that, many companies tried to grab their piece of cake by building or acquiring a portal.
Formerly, portals gained popularity as search engines or web directories only. After that, in order that the user stays on the particular portal for a longer period of time, the services were broadened and the sole strategy behing this was to expand the number of users. After that more services requiring user registration like free email, customization features, and chatrooms were added to increase the use of a portal. And then eventually as the user started staying for an exended time, an adverisement based revenue generation model was sought for. This entire process helped the portals gain its current popularity.
Regional Web portals
They are portals giving local inforamtion pertaining to somegeographical boundaries only. They are used to give information on local weather, weather forecasts, local news, maps of that area, local community, facilities, etc.
Government Web portals
The governemnts have their own portal, sometimes run by the department or run by third party vendors. These portals are used for providing regional informations along with extended applications like e-commerce, e-governance, etc. many of such portals are run on self funded tye of model wherein transaction fees are a means of revenue generation.
Corporate Web portals
Corporate portals also came into existence in late 1990s. the corporate sector became more organised with the advent of intranets, which later on grew magnanimously in size and new way of working over the net emerged. After that, personalization and customization became the need of an hour as consolidated view was not enough.
After that in late 1990s, innovation was required for the concept of corporate web portals. Many companies sprung up to offer tools to help webmasters manage their data, applications and information more convinently and in customized formats.
Today many capabilities like managing workflows, increasing collaboration between work groups, and allowing content creators to self-publish their information are being added to increase the business and customer satisfaction.
Apart from that, business portals are also designed to share collaboration in workplaces. A further requirement of portals is that the format should be able to work on multiple platforms such as personal computers, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and cell phones. Such requirements are purely business driven.
Hosted Web Portals
Hosted portals are a similar concept as corporate portals which are offered as hosted services. They are a means to serve as a medium for publishing information. They also include features of hosted databases, documants mangement, personalised emails, chat or discussion forums and much more customised facilties as per the requirement of individual users.
B2B and B2C Portals:
B2B (Business - Business) Portals have emerged as a resource for Global businesses. They provide a virtual platform for buyer and seller interaction and give details for different products across the globe. A B2B portal that is specifically used in a single industry is called a Vertical B2B Portal or a Vortal. B2C (Business - Consumer) portals directly sell products to consumres.
Investment Portals:
They are a source which provide information on global and industry specific markets and other investment tools.
Entertainment Portals:
They offer different type of entertainmant to the visitors. It can in terms of music, dance, movies, games, interactive sessions, etc. They can be a part of community based networking and collaboration.
Environmental Portals:
The sole aim in development of such portals is to promote awareness related to the environmental issues.
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Technically speaking, vortal is a synonym of vertical portal. It is a website which particularly gives a portal or a gateway to information about an industry.
There are two types of industries: vertical and horizontal. A vertical industry signifies relatively narrow or focused range of products or services while horizontal industry is used for industries with a very wide range of products or services. Generally most of the industries are in specialized form and so there are more vertical industries. In such cases the term vortal, can be also used to explain a vertical industry on website.
Vortals are the used to furnish the consumers focused environment preferences through web based technologies.
Vortals endow with news, research and statistics, discussions, newsletters, online tools, and many other services that teach the online users about a particular industry.
As foreseen by some experts, after the Web becomes a standard tool for business, vortals may replace general portal sites like as common gateways to the Internet.
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