Chapter 5

Online portals are fantastic.  Portals refer to a Web site or service that offers a broad array of resources and services, such as e-mail, forums, search engines, and online shopping malls plus more!  Horizontal portal, such as MyYahoo! Specialized website (portal) that serves as an entry point to several firms in the same industry or to the same type of suppliers. These are customizable to your personal preferences.  Vertical portals or vortals Specialized website that serves as an entry point to a specific market or industry niche, subject area, or interest.  Portals lead us all around the Web and act as gateways to  additional content.  Other types of portals include industry and corporate portals which can have customized specifics well like for a company or vendor.




  

Since just about everything is done online now-a-days, having news oriented websites makes life so much simpler!  It takes just a "click" and everything from News, sports, weather, and traffic which are updated constantly gives me instant results.  No more reading/skimming the newspaper or waiting for the evening news to come on and wait to get what I want.  I can now hop on my computer or phone and see what I'm looking for. It's instant gratification! What makes these sites so great is that (most) have interactivity and you-the user- can input specifics to get details about your region. Ever see an "Enter your zip code" search box on a website? This type of customizability targets your wants and needs not the stations or companies.  It's kinda nice to have things be all about me for a change, HA!