subject: Know The Essentials Of Community Portal Development [print this page] The web is constantly changingThe web is constantly changing. Portal development is the latest web trend. A portal is nothing but an advanced form of a web site. A plain web site is a collection of relevant web pages for users to consume the information placed on those pages with low or no interactivity option; whereas, portal is a collection of information from various sources. Portal is a single roof under which, diverse information is made available in a unified way.
Portal development mainly follows for large enterprises or businesses, which want to congregate information under a single platform and distribute it through various channels to various departments across geographical boundaries. News portals, government web portals, personal portals, shopping portals and community portals serve as some of the examples of the types of portals that can exist. Among all the above, in this article, we will focus on the details about community portal design and community portal development.
A simple example of community portal is social networking website. We made community portal a focus of this article, because it is the most preferred choice in todays industry. Community portals bring individuals together as per some common demographics; for example, similar interests, fans of the same brand, company colleagues, same work background, etc. Community portal development is a common practice in all industries. A brand launches community portal to know consumers opinions about the brand, address their grievances or know response before launching a product. On the other hand, enterprises use it to enable interdepartmental communication, know business views, increase coordination and encourage team work among employees. These portals offer a multitude benefits in each sector. However, only an ideal community portal has a potential to influence businesses.
Lets take a look at some of the essentials before engaging in community portal designing activity:
Identify the members: Building such a portal just because its a trend will not yield the desired output for your business. It is imperative to identify the participants and what should encourage them to participate.
Mutual benefit: There should be a clear reason as to why users must contribute their views to your website. Why would talking to each other over a platform benefit the user?
Instigate a communication thread: Creating good content is a key to seeding a comment thread. Right content has the power to encourage user participation in the form of comments, questions, views and suggestions. For example, iPhone 5 is the latest hit. Questions posted regarding iPhone 5 would encourage more user participation than content on the topic, which is out of users mind.
Find a metric to measure success: Once the portal starts bearing a required output, it must be compared with a set of target or metric that a business has defined for itself. Metrics helps businesses to record statistics of success or failure.
All in all, a good community portal has potential to generate traffic and redirect it to other websites. Established websites can take help of these portals to share links to stimulate traffic on their sites.
