Web Portals Explained
By Donna Justice

 
Any science fiction fan is familiar with the concept of a portal. Alice entered Wonderland, Jody Foster made "contact" with her deceased father, and Captain Kirk beamed up through a portal. Simply put, portals are gateways from one "world" to another. Web users rely on portals in the form of a browser.

Every time we surf the Net, our browser (most commonly Netscape or Explorer) serves as our gateway to a seemingly infinite number of Web sites. But Web portals take the "gateway" concept beyond the browser (basically a search engine and a generic list of hyperlinks and bookmarks) and to a customizable, user-specific interface to the Web.

The most common portal sites on the commercial Internet offer everything from the local weather to easy links to favorite sites and personalized stock updates through "channels" that each individual user can turn on or off, all from one Web page. The offering of customized channels is the biggest difference between a regular Web site and a portal site. A standard Web site displays only what the site's sponsor wants the user to access. A portal site — often based on a preference or "interests" form that first-time visitors fill out — provides links to a number of different kinds of information that you can "turn on or off" as often as you like. For convenience, these sites let you save your settings as "My Page" so that every time you open your browser, your customized portal page will appear.

As with all good things, Web portals are not for everyone. For more experienced "surfers," who know exactly where to go to find what they need or for those who are not interested in all the "bells and whistles," portals may not be the preferred gateway to the Web. But for most of us, portals can be very convenient.

Because a portal can play a large part in what Web sites we visit, portals are the hottest ticket to success on the commercial Internet. The big contenders include Yahoo! (http://www.yahoo.com/), Excite (http://www.excite.com/), AOL.com (http://www.AOL.com/), Lycos (http://www.lycos.com/), Netscape Newscenter (http://www.netscape.com/), and Infoseek (http://www.infoseek.com/). The desire to be the dominate portal on the Web has everything to do with marketing and generating revenues. Case in point, the most prominent "channel" on most portal sites is the "shopping" channel. Every time we click into an online vendor from a portal site, the portal owner gets a cut.

For nonprofit and educational institutions, like UC Davis, the motivation for creating a user-friendly portal site is to provide better service. MyUCDavis (http://sysdev.ucdavis.edu/myucdavis/) will simply make it easier for groups of users (namely students and faculty) to customize their entry into the Web, particularly to UC Davis-specific online services and information.

For more information on Web portals, see Smart Computing, January 2000 (or you can do a search for "portals" at http://www.smartcomputing.com/).