Portals

Advantages of portals

When a large established company decides to go online and set up its own website, naturally it will use its own brand name as the domain name for the new website.

The advantage of using the company's name as domain is obviuos, people searching online for information on this company's products will always start by keying in the company's brand name and quickly land on the company website. This way, the company does not have to worry about the ranking of its website on the major search engines because people will not fail to find it.
But there is a problem here, the company may have more than one core businesses,each with its own distinct nature. According to web design experts, each segment of business should have its own separate website to effectively promote it. It is bad practice to mix all of them in one website.Then which of these core businesses should be given the brand name as site domain? Web design experts came out with this brilliant idea : Each division of the company will have its own webpages, designed as a sub section of the main page. Each will have a sub-domain name which is piggy-tailed to the main domain name.
The software used for this purpose is the content management system (CMS). A visitor arriving at the company's website by typing the company's brand name will be able to see links to other divisions of the companies listed in the website as sub categories.The website will look neat and clean and at the same time allow the visitor a mean to go to other divisions quickly.
These types of websites are called portals.

Established portals

Examples of reputable portals are Yahoo!, Google, Micro Soft Network, Amazon, eBay. Just type in Yahoo.com, you will be taken to its main page, the main objective of which is to provide search engine service. But from there you may branch to its mail services, social network, news services, online malls, etc.
Owners of smaller websites are also developing their own simple portals by moving other sites managed by them into one website, the chosen domain name is taken from the website which is the most popular of them all. So in this way, the lesser known websites will gain more exposeture thus inceasing the traffic and sales which is otherwise not possible.

Start your own portals

First identify which of your websites draws the most visitors, then install the CMS software on this site.Create links to other websites owned by you. Ideally all your sites should be hosted on the same server, but is not a must. If you have already gained the trust of customers buying things from this website, now that they know the other sites also belong to you they may have more confidence to buy from those sites. You see the power of a portal now?