A Study of a Wine Industry Internet Portal

Abstract

A simple definition of a portal sees it as a special Internet (or intranet) Web site designed to act as a gateway to give convenient access to other related sites (Davison, Burgess, & Tatnall, 2003). Moreover, portals can be grouped or classified based on genre, with a diverse number of different types of portal types being based on alliances, geographic regions, special interest, and communities. Regional portals that are of particular interest in this article tend to be a special type of community portal centred on a specific locality. As such, they have a utility in providing various advantages for the participants, allowing them to feel as if they are part of, and contribute to, the local regional community. Moreover, there are significant benefits that portal participation provides in allowing firms to interact with other local businesses, allowing not only physical products/services to be transacted, but also in fermenting new business relationships (Sellitto & Burgess 2005). Indeed, regional portal participation contributes to the goodwill factor that manifests at the local business level and invariably, also at the social level throughout the regional community. This article introduces some background on portals, and provides an illustration of how a real-world regional wine cluster adopted an Internet portal to strengthen and benefit their regional partnerships. Arguably, the research is one of the few published works on industry clusters and their association to Internet portals.