Factors Affecting Portal Design

Abstract

The word portal has been citied in the literature as one of the most popular terms. A Google search on the Web for the word revealed 25.6 million entries in December2003. Due to a considerable degree of overuse and overlap, portals are seen everywhere and it would be difficult to make any use of the Web without encountering one (Tatnall, 2004). According to White (2000), a portal provides user-customizable access to information and applications through a Web browser. Tatnall (2004) specifies that a portal aggregates information from multiple sources and makes that information available to various users. In other words, a portal can be defined as an integrated and personalized Web-based application that provides the end user with a single point of access to a wide variety of aggregated content anytime and from anywhere using any Web-enabled client device.