An important notion behind the
concept of a portal is that it does not provide much content itself, but rather organises content
from other providers. Other more restrictive technical definitions of portals are used by some
scholars, but we prefer the broader definition that simply equates a portal to a gateway. While
some aspects of the Bizewest portal, the subject of this chapter, could be described just as
Web pages, as the primary purpose of Bizewest was to provide a gateway to information
and services that might be useful to the SMEs, we will describe it as a portal.
There is no definitive categorisation of the various types of portal, but Davison, Burgess,
and Tatnall (2004) offer the following:
???. General. portals: These portals try to be the ???one-stop shops??? for all (or at least
many) user needs. Many of these have developed from being simple search tools
such as Yahoo (http://au.yahoo.com/), Internet service providers such as AOL (www.
aol.com.au/), or e-mail services like Hotmail ??“ NineMSN (http://ninemsn.com.au/).
Many general portals include services such as: free e-mail, links to search engines and
categories of information, membership services, news and sports, business headlines
and articles, personalised space with a user??™s selections, links to chat rooms, links to
virtual shopping malls, and Web directories.
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