By Ralph Budelman COURSE OUTLINE Introduction: Creating your own portal or vortal Lesson 1: Portal and vortal concepts, community, collaboration, interaction and more Lesson 2: Developing the core content and design Lesson 3: Adding Features Called Components

Portal / Vortal Tutorial

INTRODUCTION : Creating your own Portal or Vortal

Prerequisites
Perhaps you are taking this tutorial because you want to learn how to create more than just a website. You want to build an online community and put some interactivity into a site. You want to learn how to build a portal or vortal. If this is true and you already know the basics of creating a web page then keep reading because this online course is for you.

But, if you don't know the basics of web development then you should spend about eight hours at webmonkey.com or bignosebird.com before doing this tutorial.

Cut and Paste Vortal

This tutorial is designed for normal non-technical people. It is a cut and paste tutorial. In other words, when you are finished with this online course, you should be able to build a portal or vortal by simply cutting and pasting the pieces together.

Get ready to become like a 'building contractor'. The contractor builds the building but he does not actually make the bricks. In the same way, after this tutorial, you will be able to build a vortal. You need not know any programming! We will simply take (mostly free) component scripts and put them together to create a simple portal or vortal. For example, in this online course we will find a component script for a discussion forum and learn how to add the discussion forum to a website. This added feature will allow visitors to discuss issues and ask questions.

We will look to the web as a resource to help us. There are plenty of good web pages that can help us in our building project. We will look at these sites as the source for our building blocks. They will provide us not only instruction but also scripts that we will download and use.

Most people could build their own portal by learning and researching on the Internet. All the information you need is right here. This tutorial will give you tips and steps that will accelerate you portal development. We will pull together together many of our hard-earned experiences and save you a lot of time.

What is Your Vision?

First we need to get an idea of what a good portal should look like. Some of you may remember habit two of Stephen Covey's book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. This habit is called Begin With the End in Mind.

Assignment

Get Ideas From Other Vortals

The first action step in our tutorial will be to look at other portals to discover what makes a good portal so that you can envision what your site might look like. Some of the following examples were taken from an excellent book called Strike it Rich.com by Jaclyn Easton. She is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times and has written 23 case studies of successful websites. I highly recommend that you buy and read this book.

www.mountainzone.com

This site focuses on the the three C's: content, community and commerce. The company sells outdoor sporting products but has built a following of loyal customers partly because of its good content including live coverage of a Mount Everest climb.

www.fool.com

This site is a prime example of collaboration. It is aimed at individual investors. They can collaborate with other investors who visit this site and add their suggestions rather an seeking biased advise from a stockbroker.

In the next lesson we will examine some portal and vortal concepts and the parts of a portal or vortal. In the mean time think about what you want to accomplish with your portal. What is your goal and who is your target audience?

Also we will look at the following portal / vortal concepts:

• Community/ Friends
• Collaboration
• Common Interest Group
• Interaction
• Sticky
• Responsiveness
• Changing to Meet Customer's Needs
• What is your Goal?
• Adding Value to Your Visitor