Creating Successful Portals with a Design Framework

Abstract

Portal designers and managers face the difficulties of creating effective information architectures for portals, dashboards, and tile-based platforms for delivering business information and functionality using only flat portlets. This article introduces the idea of a system of standardized building blocks that can simplifies portal design and management, and effectively support growth in content, functionality, and users over time. In enterprise and other large scale social settings, using standardized components allows for the creation of a library of tiles that can be shared across communities of users. It then outlines the design principles underlying the building block system, and the simple guidelines for combining blocks together to create any type of tile-based environment.