How Portal Website Works

A web portal is a customized website that immerses information from a wide array of sources in a consistent and uniformed manner.

For example, web portals are served in the form of dashboards for company executives and managers. How the content on a portal should be organized and presented depends largely on the requirements of the end users?

A web portal may be customized based on the restrictions of domain searches. An enterprise portal usually has a consistent design and has the capability to interact with applications and databases.

There are various types of web portals depending on the usage and content restrictions. Some of them are:

• Government and federal portals
• Corporate and enterprise portals
• Cultural and trade portals
• Stock and financial portals
• Search portals
• Tender and bidding portals
• Domain specific portals

A programmer embarking on web portal development has to consider many factors before a portal can be made available for consumption, either internally or externally. From a developer’s perspective, there are many things to balance, such as, design vs platform, stability vs early build, and standards vs business goals, to name a few.

User Experience and Interface:

• Cross browser compatibility
• Device compatibility, for examples, tablets, smartphones, etc.
• Section 508 compliance
• Seamless updates and patches
• Friendly error messages and proper exception handling
• Progressive enhancement
• Security

Prevention of SQL injections and intrusions:

• Fail-safe password encryption
• Two factor authentication
• SSL/HTTPS for secure login
• Avoiding cross site scripting
• Keeping your system protected with the latest virus definitions and software patches

Performance:

• Proper usage of caching
• Image and media content optimization
• Cookie management
• Minimizing the amount of HTTP requests
• SEO

Usage of search engine friendly URLs:

• Proper sitemap of the portal
• Proper link nomenclature
• Know how search engine spiders work