What Is an Online Portal?
Mary Elizabeth
Mary Elizabeth
A portal is a door or an entryway. The term online refers to the Internet and the web pages that form part of the World Wide Web. An online portal, or web portal, is a website that provides an entry point for a range of information, tools, and links.
An online portal may serve a variety of purposes. Some types of portal are meant to serve as a one-stop shop for most of what certain Internet users would need most. By offering an array of the most often used types of information and services — and sometimes allowing for personalization — an online portal can save a user a lot of time. One part of the typical offerings for this type of portal are the top current events that are found in many newspapers: headlines and links to important national — and maybe local — news, weather forecasts, the day’s primetime television listing, stock market reports, and sports headlines. Also typical are entertainment news, health news, dating and romance tips, a horoscope, trending topics, hyperlinks to related sites, a search engine, and sometimes free, web-based email.
Another type of online portal is a company portal, often called an enterprise portal. This type of web portal is generally hosted on a corporate Intranet and is the Intranet entry point. It features information and tools of interest and value to the employees of the company. Like other portals, it may feature search engine functionality, but focused on internal assets, access to web-based email, content specifically for employees, and in some cases, broader Internet access, possibly only to selected sites. This type of portal may also include functions that are associated with a business dashboard.
A vertical industry portal, or vortal, is an online portal that is specialized to reflect the interests and needs of the members of a particular industry. Thus, all the information — whether data, news, statistics, or research, tools, forums, and other offerings are linked to the target industry. Vortals may be hosted by special interest groups, associations, and trade magazines. Vortals are found in fields such as agriculture, computers, energy, entertainment, business services, construction, and advertising, and may also be involved in ecommerce.
Mary Elizabeth
Mary Elizabeth is passionate about reading, writing, and research, and has a penchant for correcting misinformation on the Internet. In addition to contributing articles to EasyTechJunkie about art, literature, and music, Mary Elizabeth is a teacher, composer, and author. She has a B.A. from the University of Chicago’s writing program and an M.A. from the University of Vermont, and she has written books, study guides, and teacher materials on language and literature, as well as music composition content for Sibelius Software.
Mary Elizabeth
Mary Elizabeth is passionate about reading, writing, and research, and has a penchant for correcting misinformation on the Internet. In addition to contributing articles to EasyTechJunkie about art, literature, and music, Mary Elizabeth is a teacher, composer, and author. She has a B.A. from the University of Chicago’s writing program and an M.A. from the University of Vermont, and she has written books, study guides, and teacher materials on language and literature, as well as music composition content for Sibelius Software.
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AS FEATURED ON:
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![Hyperlinks can lead to related sites.]()
By: See-ming LeeHyperlinks can lead to related sites. -
![An intranet portal is a multi-function website that includes public and private sections, personalized content, and data retrieval and submission tools.]()
By: micromonkeyAn intranet portal is a multi-function website that includes public and private sections, personalized content, and data retrieval and submission tools. -
![An education portal is a specially designed website that provides a host of educational services.]()
By: Adrin ShamsudinAn education portal is a specially designed website that provides a host of educational services. -
![Some online portals are used to seek out dating and romance tips.]()
By: Andrey KiselevSome online portals are used to seek out dating and romance tips. -
![Fitness groups can utilize online portals to organize group workouts.]()
By: Monkey BusinessFitness groups can utilize online portals to organize group workouts.
Discussion Comments
@Melonlity -- people still use portals quite a bit, but most no longer pay for them. Take the page you land on when you first launch your browser. That is usually a search engine with news, mail and other functions that are accessible from the home page. You don't pay a dime for that service, but it offers the same array of services as the old portals that people used to pay to access.
These used to be the way people reached and interacted with the Internet. You would buy your Internet access through a national Internet service provider and the online portable was effectively software that you would run on your desktop that would offer mail, chat services, games and other things in addition to an Internet browser.
There are still some operating, but they are no longer as common as they once were. One of the problems was that those were set up for telephone access and didn't survive the transition to broadband very well. There just wasn't much point of paying one company for a portal and another company for broadband access.
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