There is a significant difference between a web portal and a website, but many still confuse these two concepts. The main difference is their scale and functionality. Web portals provide a wider range of information and services to users, while websites are more often focused on specific tasks and goals. If you are thinking about web portal development or creating a website, then in this article you will understand the differences, which will help you make the right decision.
What Is a Web Portal And What Is a Website
A portal is a web resource that gives the user the opportunity to use a wide range of interactive services that are implemented in one place. We are sure that each of the readers has an account on some social network or has at least once seen its interface. Let’s take Facebook, it has services such as sending messages, donations, games, weather, and much more. The abundance of services on one web resource indicates that this is a portal.
Conventionally, portals can be divided into:
- informational;
- thematic;
- government;
- intranet (closed).
Corporate portals provide access to information and functionality to clients, employees, and company partners.
A state portal is usually a portal in which the customer is the state. Through this type of portal, the state provides various services and provides services to the population.
An information portal is a huge web resource that contains detailed information on a specific topic. Often contains tools for interaction with users, thematic mailings, search, as well as a forum or chat.
A closed (intranet) portal is, for example, an internal corporate information portal, access to which only company employees have. It is used for quick exchange of messages, documents, tasks, etc.
How Is Portal Development Different From Website Development?
Differences between developing a web portal and a website?
Having examined the theory, let’s move on to the differences. Here it is necessary to clarify that any portal is a site, but not every site is a portal.
- Preparation and ready-made solutions.
There are a large number of templates for website development. They allow you to solve standard, typical problems. When developing a corporate portal, it becomes impossible to use them, because clear requirements must be met that will effectively solve the assigned tasks. In addition, a portal is a site with a large amount of information and wide ramifications, and choosing a template solution for the initial data is an extremely difficult task. Even if one is found, it is not a fact that it will work for your business tasks.
In this case, the full development cycle is suitable:
- Gathering information and planning goals and objectives;
- Prototyping and development of technical specifications;
- Design development;
- Layout and programming;
- Content filling, testing, and implementation.
2. Load.
When 100 or 1000 visitors visit the site per day, then you need to think less about optimizing the speed of page display in the browser.
The same applies to the volume of objects, for example, in a product catalog. When there are more than 1 million of them with a bunch of properties and characteristics, then you should think about how to design a database and, in principle, which database to use. For example, NOSQL.
For projects based on popular CMS, various caching mechanisms are actively used. This method is an intermediate buffer in which data is stored. Due to this mechanism, the site page is not recreated for each user. Caching makes it possible to work with a large amount of data in the shortest possible time and with limited resources.
3. Functionality.
If within a corporate website, the standard capabilities of a CMS site may be sufficient, then for a portal, the estimate for a project may contain 100-200 or more items of necessary functionality. For example:
- the complex structure of objects and connections between them;
- integration activities with various services;
- several personal accounts with different business logic;
- databases of files and documents;
- mailings in the form of email, SMS, Push messages;
- periodic tasks and notifications.
Thus, as a rule, the functionality of the portal is more complex and rich.
4. Business logic.
Within portals, it is necessary to implement certain business logic.
Business logic is a set of programmed actions that are displayed in response to a particular pattern of human actions. It can influence many processes in the operation of the portal: payment, editorial policy, shipment of goods, reservation of goods, notifications to couriers or transport companies, generation of documents, invoices, acts, and so on.
Uniqueness Of Web Portals
Web portals usually include such interesting and important components as blogs, reviews, forums, and galleries with photos or videos. Regular websites are usually limited to some of these modules or do not have them at all. However, for a web portal, these modules play an important role, in particular for the development of the community and the stable activation of its members.
Web portals are relatively easier to promote (this is especially true for portals where all pages are interconnected). Such a web portal will most likely be able to achieve a leading position in terms of current user requests. A good example of such a web portal is Wikipedia.
Unlike simple websites, a web portal consists of a variety of content. There, users can find not only the usual blog posts on the site but also infographics, videos, and photos.
Attendance is another indicator that distinguishes web portals. It is quite difficult for a traditional site that is dedicated to a specific topic to compete according to this criterion. The reason lies in the volume of content. Since there is more content on a web portal, users find and visit it more often.
Final Thoughts
Web portals are powerful tools that can be customized to solve a variety of problems and serve different purposes depending on the needs of the organization or audience. If you are looking for a reliable company for web portal development, we recommend paying attention to Digiteum. The company has impressive experience in designing, developing, and modernizing web portals, sites, and applications.
