Now
that you have learned many vortal/portal concepts let us continue with seven
practical steps to building a portal, but first a quote from an article
on bitpipe.com. to motivate you to learn.
"Portals are the hottest trend in the Internet industry
today, with virtually every company in cyberspace trying to capitalize
on this growing new mania. Not surprisingly, this flurry of activity is
blurring the definition of a portal site."
- BitPipe.com
Developing a vertical portal/vortal requires careful planning.
Some questions you should ask yourself are:
Who is your audience? What are their needs or points of
interest? How can they be served?
You can find more questions and answers to help you plan
in another section of this site. This planning guide is called the Website
Redesign Guide and will help you think through the planning process. The
following are two examples from this Guide.
1. What is the mood or emotion that you want to communicate?
Decide on the overall theme and "look and feel" of the site.
Example of this are: humor, professional, academic, family, technical,
etc. Write three adjectives to describe the way you want your site to
feel.
2. What graphic elements need to be compromised for the
sake of speed? Only so much information can travel through a small phone
line. This is what limits the size of pictures and amount of sound.
Consider the size of every piece of the site and determine
if it can be made smaller or eliminated.
There is so much planning to be done. Designing and thinking
through a good portal can take as much as 25% of the total development
time. But let's move on since we have so much to cover. Before that we
should consider something that is different about developing a vortal/portal.
When building a large complex portal or vortal it is a good idea to develop
it in phases starting with a pilot.
We mention this here in the planning step because if the
planning includes starting with a pilot then some planning can take place
after the pilot rather than at the very beginning of the project.
Most people who contact us (stylusinc.com) are developing
their first portal. Generally they are not able to imagine the whole site
nor are they able to imagine how the visitors will respond. To more forward
in "bite size chunks" we recommend building the site in phases.
This allows the site to evolve and improve as it goes. Building
this kind of flexibility into the planning prevents the site from accidentally
going in the wrong direction. It also gives the site owner a chance to
see things work and make course corrections.
Another major advantage to "growing" a vortal
in phases is the marketing benefit. From the visitors stand point it is
a positive experience for them to visit a growing site. It gives the sense
of action and growth and it causes h/her to return for new information.
And it creates a more exciting and successful image while building momentum.
If your are developing the site yourself, a fully functioning
pilot provides a good way to visualize the site and is an opportunity
to learn the development process. You can discover if you are capable
of overcoming the technical complexities during this time.
If you are hiring a developer you can us this pilot phase
to learn how to work together. Once the pilot is completed it is a good
time to evaluate development. You may decide to hire another company or
continue with the same company.
The main rule is to develop the content with the audience
in mind. The site needs to hold the interest of the visitor by providing
the accurate information they need. But there is another important rule
in developing content specifically for the web. You will discover this
unique concept later.
Many of the best portals are content orientated. for example
www.webmonkey.com. This site has some great articles on web development.
The merger of Time Warner and AOL is evidence of the need to merge content
and the Internet. This site (www.stylusinc.com) is always on the lookout
for good content. We hire writers; get permission to use already written
articles and get syndicated articles.
Some good portals receive content from the visitors. For
example, some sites encourage readers to add comments to an article. In
my opinion, this is great. First I find myself agreeing with the author
of the article and then eventually disagreeing after reading the comments.
In this way, the web provides a great opportunity to get different perspectives.
This portal tutorial you are reading is an example of content.
This tutorial is one of the most popular pages on this site. It is receiving
about 70 hits per day. The other pages that are popular on this site are
also content pages. For example another popular section, India Cultural
Tips, gets hundreds of hits each month.
But the most popular content on this site is the CGI Installation
Tutorial. Besides adding value to a visitor's experience it gives our
company creditability. And of course we like the hundred or so hits per
day it creates.
I just mentioned three content areas of our site. They are
the most popular pages and were inspired in part, to provide value to
our visitors but also to attract visitors from search engines. We must
be honest here. We are not producing content only to help you. You know
that. We really want to attract people who want to hire us to build a
vortal. If we provide this tutorial to you we hope that it eventually
will benefit us in the long run. But the point I want to make is that
we develop content with the search engines in mind.
To some it may appear to be a backward process to start
with the search engine. But it makes sense. We consider the type of person
we want to attract to our site and next we think of what words they will
enter into the search engines and then we write the article. For more
insights into this you can go to the article on this called " How to Increase
Traffic and Get More Visitors and Customers to Your Website."
Content will continue to be an important part of any vortal.
For the next few years text will be king on the web. Only about 5 million
people globally have access to the Internet at speeds that justifies much
more than text. But over the next two years it is expected that huge advances
will be made in providing higher bandwidth to facilitate audio and video.
There will be great fun ahead. I just wish I were 18 years old.
I find it helpful to map out the whole site with a pencil
and paper. Then I start developing the content. I agree with the following
paragraph from a tutorial called Information Architecture Tutorial by
John Sample on www.webmonkey.com
Form a skeleton, pick your metaphors, map out your navigation.
Then it's time to break out the graphics program, come up with layout
grids, design sketches, and mock-ups, and get ready to build!
Navigation is kind of a secret weapon. If your site is fast
and easy for visitors to find things then you are probably way ahead of
the competition. In the future navigation may mean the difference between
success and failure.
The sites that will succeed are those that a) helps the
visitor to quickly locate the information or products b) keeps the visitor
on the site c) causes them to return. Per the key is navigation. Imagine
trying to shop in a grocery store where things we randomly placed on the
shelves. It would take 10 time longer than normal to shop. The same holds
true for the web. As more information and products fill the Internet cables
it becomes critical to have good navigation.
Navigation requires careful design and testing. Sites can
be organized in many different ways. Just as a grocery store can be organized
it many ways so to can a website.
There really is no perfect system of navigation. There can
be as many opinions about this as there are opinions about what is a nice
house. I have found two great sites that can help. Both have good information
on navigation but each has a slightly different strategy. The following
are quotes from each.
Site # 1 Is Navigation Useful? www.useit.com
User studies typically find:
Users comment on the content first; if the content is
not relevant, then they don't care about any other aspect of the design.
When they arrive on a page, users ignore navigation bars
and other global design elements: instead they look only at the content
area of the page.
Users don't understand where they are in a website's
information architecture
Users are extremely goal-driven and look only for the
one thing they have in mind - they don't spend much time on promotions
for anything else.
In pursuit of their goal, users often rely on search
as their main hunting strategy.
Users rarely look at logos, mission statements, slogans,
or any other elements they consider fluff (in particular, they ignore
advertising and anything that looks like an ad)
If a page does not appear relevant to the user's current
goals, then the user will ruthlessly click the Back button after two to
three seconds.
If users don't understand a certain design element, they
don't spend time learning it - instead, they ignore it and continue the
hunt for their own goal.
Article # 2 Yale Style Manual of Style http://info.med.yale.edu/caim/manual/interface/interface.html
Users of Web documents don't just look at information,
they interact with it in novel ways that have no precedents in paper document
design. The graphic user interface (GUI) of a computer system includes
the interaction metaphors, images and concepts used to convey function
and meaning on the computer screen, the detailed visual characteristics
of every component of the graphic interface, and functional sequence of
interactions over time that produce the characteristic "look and feel"
of Web pages and hypertext linked relationships. Graphic design and visual
"signature" graphics are not just used to "jazz up" Web pagesgraphics
are an integral part of the user's experience with your site. In interactive
documents it is impossible to fully separate graphic design from issues
of interface design.
The above illustrates the variety of viewpoints and the
need to learn more. These sites are also referenced here so that you can
go to these sites for more information.
Over all navigation is one of those things that you only
notice if it is bad. It is extremely import and worthy of study. After
all how many of you have ever notice the navigation or organization of
a grocery store?
I once made a five-minute speech to two different audience's
one hour apart. The first was serious and I read from my notes. I was
very accurate in what I said but the speech was a bomb. Afterwards no
one came over to talk to me. The second speech was different. I joked
and was very animated. Afterwards many people came up to me and thanked
me and asked questions.
I concluded: it is just as important how it is said as what
is said. I believe it applies to websites. The visitors can pick up the
tone of the site. Does it communicate quality, stability, creditability
or does is it seem like a homemade site.
Spend some time looking at different sites and write down
the first word that comes to mind. These first words will give you a clue
to the "look and feel" for the site.
Step
Six - Get Feedback, Understand the Audience and Modify
The ideal site would respond and change according to the
feedback provided by the visitors. If only it were possible to discover
the needs of the visitor. Fortunately the web allows feedback that is
faster and easier than every before.
Perhaps this explains the popularity of the community chat
sites. The visitor gets h/her answer or needs met by the response of another
visitor rather than a salesman or professional selling services. A smart
vortal operator will create as many opportunities to learn about h/her
audience and create opportunities for visitors to learn from each other.
Learning from a chat is one really good way to discover
the issues of the visitors. I read about one wedding site that recognized
that they could read the pulse of the visitors from reading the discussion
people were having in their own site. Their site evolved based on some
of these discussions.
There are other ways of understanding the audience. For
example on this site (www.stylusinc.com) we watch the ratio of visitors
to hits. We wish our visitors would go to at least 6 pages per visit.
This would indicate to us they are really interested in our site, but
unfortunately we only get around 4 hits per visitor.
Macromedia has a product called ARIA. It is billed as "State
of the Art Web Site Activity Analysis Software. This product can be used
to profile the visitor activity on the site. These reports can be used
to make sure the site is optimizing the visitor's experience. Another
good product from Macromedia is LikeMinds. This server based product helps
to create a site that automatically understands the visitors likes and
dislikes and offers up personalized pages that contain personally relevant
content and products.
A good vortal is an ongoing process of getting feedback
and improving and building. Contrary to what most newcomers believe, it
is not self-sustaining. It takes a lot of work, as we will discuss in
the next step.
I always say to people who are consider developing a vortal
that developing the portal or vortal is only a small part of the Job.
It requires a lot of work to keep it going. Simply responding to emails
can be a big job. But there are many other things involved.
Lesson
2: Developing Content and Design