First of all, it is important to understand what a web portal actually is. A web portal is a single website that displays designated information in an organized manner. Web portals are used to bring information from all over the internet and show it all in one place for the person viewing the website to be able to access easily. A lot of the time, web portals will provide links to other web content based on the preferences of the user and the type of the web portal.
There are two kinds of web portals, vertical and horizontal. Horizontal web portals are used to display various representatives of a certain industry or “niche”, whereas vertical web portals – namely vertical information platforms – are basically specific to the industry or topic, and are used as platforms for things like news content, online magazines, and online stores (ecommerce).
There are a few things you will likely need in order to successfully create a web portal:
• A domain name
• Webhosting with mySQL databases
• Medium to excellent website building skills
• Confidence in your ability to upload using FTP and installing PHP scripts
Next, you need to decide what kind of portal you are going to create. Is it going to be a search engine, like Yahoo and Google? Will it be regional, so people can view information relevant to where they are located? Or will it be more of a hobby portal?
Once you have decided what kind of portal you want to create, you need to download and install the web portal software and follow the script specific instructions. This is where the mySQL capabilities will be of much help – and this can sometimes require some research. You need to find the one that is going to be easy to get support for, so that in case the website ever goes down, you won’t be offline for too long.
After you have found your web portal software, it’s time to customize it to your preferences. There are some helpful resources online to show you how to do this if you are experiencing difficulties.
When it comes to developing web applications, a quite extensive knowledge of code writing – and different types of code – is required. There are many websites that teach basic HTML and CSS code writing for beginners. This is a really good place to start if you are not savvy with code writing, as they are considered to be two of the most basic codes to learn. Different types of code and their uses can be found all over the Internet as well.
Web portals and Web applications require a lot of time and knowledge, and they have to be tested very thoroughly from many different angles to ensure they are user-friendly and easy to navigate. Professionals who test portals and applications also test for responsiveness, because there is so much involved in the creation of these – especially applications – that it is rather easy for even an experienced code writer or developer to forget one little character in the code and have a page that doesn’t work as intended.
Building your own web portal, always remember that code writing, web portal and web application development is not considered easy by any means. So if you are just starting out with web development, don’t despair if you mess it up from time to time – it takes a significant amount of practice to get it right, so keep practicing.
