Web portals are used to provide connection from a web page to different sources. Web portals support multiple applications which are used in various ways like search engine which provides archives for a variety of information that includes stocks exchange, news, books, and electronic mailing services among many others.
Web portals are classified according to their intended functions. There are three classes of web portals namely horizontal and vertical portals. A vertical portal is also called a vort, it focuses on a particular kind of business, theme and subject. A horizontal portal covers multiple areas and acts as a display place for organizations in a similar economic industry, for instance hotel industry. Vertical information portal (VIP) focuses on the availing information, for example news, digital substance and business opportunities. VIPs support multimedia applications for instance social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter and blogging. VIPs are known to exhaust online marketing by establishing land pages according to the client’s requirements (Sullivan, 2004).
Personal portals on the internet present customized services to their users by availing links to other resources on the network. They use multiple application programs and hardware to give access to users to other available resources from different sources. They are mainly used to convey news and data, just to mention but a few. They can be very useful when one needs to access external information that is related to a specific topic.
Regional portals cover wide geographical portals with resources that are relevant to a given region for example news on weather forecasts. News portals are used by media agencies i.e. television channels, to convey information to all parts of the world. Examples include Sky News, CNN and Aljazeera. Regional portals are also essential in business to business (B2B) exchanges, where businesses come together on a website to share ideas and conduct business activities.
Government portals are identified by their domain names, for instance gov. Most countries have integrated information technology and communication into their government structures. This has led to the increase of governments that have set aside a portal for their nationals. These government portals act as a medium of communication between a government and its nationals.
This utility is highly valued in some countries because citizens use it to forward their grievances and suggestions to the authorities. For instance people who want to participate in the annual global green card lottery from the United States of America, they will have to provide their private information through the US government portal (USA.gov). In some countries the government runs different portals for various purposes for example for instance the portal for persons with disability may vary from the main government portal (Shelly, Napier, & Rivers, 2009).
Corporate portals are used to provide services in an organization with accuracy and reliability. It is therefore suggested that organizations provide profile of the organization in their portal. This is said to improve the credibility of an organization’s portal. In some organizations the company portal is used by employees and clients to access important services that are available virtually. Moreover businesses use enterprise information portal (EIP) to enable customers, employees, and other stakeholders to have a single connection to the company’s information.
According to Sullivan (2009), stock portals are used in stock markets by share holders to get updates on stock bids, stock prices and also to buy and sell shares. They contain the database of all shares in a stock market referred to as the central depository system. Tender’s portals are used by bidders to bid for bidding tenders electronically which is much faster than the old tiring processes of bidding that involved a lot of paper work. These tender’s portals use state-of –the-art technology that notifies bidders about the latest bids. They also enable bidders to fill electronic forms which make it easier for bidders to present their bids on the internet.
References
Shelly, G.B., Napier, H.A, & Rivers, O. (2009). Discovering the Internet: Complete Concepts and Techniques. 3rd Ed. Boston: Cengage Learning, Inc.
Sullivan, D. (2004). Proven Portals: Best Practices for Planning, Designing, and Developing Enterprise Portals. Boston: Pearson Education, Inc.