What and why of portals

why do I need a portal - or not

[Robo]

We have several KISS websites for a very non-pc-savvy audience, lets say rather internet-lazy as well. All the sites are dynamic, php-css coding, no cms and where possible without java scripts. Nothing fancy and flashy, just functional.

Last year I started a stand-alone forum for our Newcastles of the World association, to help improve communication between the (also rather lazy) members. It is SMF based and I just installed the SMF Gallery Pro. When tweaking this, I keep running into remarks how great this or that ..Portal would be to use with this forum. I never quite understand why.

It's late, I am getting a bit older, but what the *** is a portal and why should I need one. I googled, got a million results, none of them really explaining it in a way that makes sense for me.

Any takers who can explain this to me?

[tangor]

As found at Wikipedia:

A web portal is most often one specially designed web site that brings information together from diverse sources in a uniform way. Usually, each information source gets its dedicated area on the page for displaying information (a portlet); often, the user can configure which ones to display. Variants of portals include mashups and intranet "dashboards" for executives and managers. The extent to which content is displayed in a "uniform way" may depend on the intended user and the intended purpose, as well as the diversity of the content. Very often design emphasis is on a certain "metaphor" for configuring and customizing the presentation of the content and the chosen implementation framework and/or code libraries. In addition, the role of the user in an organization may determine which content can be added to the portal or deleted from the portal configuration.

[en.wikipedia.org...]

That's actually a pretty fair description of a "web portal".

[Robo]

That wiki I read also. It lead me to believe that, given our target audience for our normal websites and for the forum, I do not really see any significant addition to those sides by adding a portal or creating a portal for those sides.

[tangor]

That's probably correct. Portals tend to bring in OTHER sites, not just yours and gain their rep by how they CURATE other sites material/offerings.

[keyplyr]

Your feedback suggesting the migration to a portal set-up may just be from those who became comfortable with a portal approach, example: Yahoo users.

[tangor]

Are there any relevant portal pages left? (discount those MSM front pages, etc). At one time Portal Pages were rather eclectic collections of "things to see".

Off the top of my head I can't think of any. Portals, at one time, were like: [youtube.com...]

[keyplyr]

Some ISP home pages resemble the portal model.