Why have a web site when you can have a portal?

por·tal (pôr'tl) n.

Middle English, from Old French, from Medieval Latin portāle, city gate, from neuter of portālis, of a gate, from Latin porta, gate

Easy to Maintain

Web sites can be difficult to maintain and are often out-of-date and inaccurate. Maintaining an eHostPort portal requires no special software nor HTML knowledge.

More Visitors

Well known techniques to increase visitors to your website are;

• Your website must be attractive, professional and informative
  • The various professionally designed skins produce attractive websites
• Change your website content regularly to give visitors a reason to come back and visit again
  • Your portal website is easy to change
• Determine who is visiting your site so that you can communicate with them
  • The web site portal provides an automatic visitor registration system
  • You can easily create a formatted newsletter that you send to registered visitors
• Encourage visitors to register by provide extra information or features
  • Information can be made private to some or all registered users
  • Contributing to blogs and forums is restricted to registered users
  • All features are controlled by a single login; no mulitple logins.

Feature Rich with Collaboration Tools

Basic web sites provide text and graphics support. An eHostPort portal provides the features of a standard web site plus additional modules to support event calendars, RSS newsfeeds, picture galleries, XML, and more. Blogs, discussion forums, feedback forms and  guest books are collaboration tools which provide two way communications between you and your clients. The sites automatically include a search capability and breadcrumbs for easy navigation.

Security and Individualization

Standard web sites present the same pages to every visitor. A portal web site supports the registration of users so that they can login in the future. The login identifies the user for collaboration tools such as the blog, feedback forms and discussion forums. You can control the presentation of different web pages or components within a web page depending on the user. For example, users who are not logged in can see some public web pages, but logged in users will see more web content. You can even associate content with fees so that users will automatically be directed to a payment processor like PayPal. Once the payments is made, the user will automatically have the content made available to them. User registration can provide automatic access or the access can be dependent on a manual vetting process.

Guided Tour

For a guided tour to building a portal website, visit http://dotnetnuke.com/guidedtour 

Watch the Product Overview training video available at http://dotnetnuke.com/Default.aspx?tabid=810 

Look at the portal website at http://eXpertGenealogy.com/port