Web Portal Design Made Easy

A Web Hosting Article Contributed by Frances Rhea

7 Steps to Your Web Portal Design

Web Portal design is not much different that Web site design. Although it takes careful planning you can quickly have your design complete.

Planning the Web Portal Design

Know your audience and what their needs or points of interest are. Determine the mood or emotion that you want to communicate whether humorous, professional, academic, family, or technical.

Consider the size of every part of the site. Determine if it can be made smaller or eliminated.

Your designing and planning can take as much as one fourth of your total development time. It is a good idea to develop your Web Portal in phases. This is because it can be difficult to imagine the whole site at once. It is also hard to determine exactly what your visitor will want and need. This allows the site to evolve and improve as it goes on. It also gives you a chance to see how things will work and make any changes.

Web Portal Design Content Development

The Web Portal needs to hold the interest of the visitors by providing the accurate information they need. This can be accomplished by writing some of the information yourself, hiring writers, or getting content from visitors. This can be done by encouraging readers to add comments to an article.

Flow Chart of the Web Portal Design

Form a skeleton for you Portal design and map out your navigation. Then create your graphics, make a few design sketches and you are ready to build.

Navigation for the Web Portal Design

Your Portal should be fast and easy for visitors to find things. Your navigation should help the visitor quickly locate information or products.

There is no perfect system for navigation. When your visitor arrives on your main page, they ignore navigation bars and look mainly at the content area. They are goal-driven and look for the things they have in mind. Your users will often rely on search as their main hunting strategy. If a page does not appear relevant, they will click the Back button after two or three seconds.

Navigation is only noticed if it is bad. This makes testing it necessary.

Web Portal Graphics

Your visitors will pick up the tone of your design. Quality, stability, and creditability are important to convey.

Getting Feedback and Modification

The ideal Web Portal design would change according to the feedback provided by visitors. Create opportunities to learn about your audience and opportunities for visitors to learn from each other.

Reading the chat room is one way to discover what your visitors want.

Maintenance and Expansion

The design and development phases are only a small part of a good Web Portal. There are many other things involved in the process. It is important that you update the Web Portal content, create new content, promote the site through search engines, respond to visitors, and get linked to other relevant sites in order to have it be successful.