Portal or no Portal?

A default installation of vBAdvanced is very bulky and unsightly. In my experience people leave it like that with no regard to aesthetics. This results in mismatched columns, superfluous information and an unpleasant experience.

However, for the price, vBAdvanced is a great piece of software and can bring value to any website if it is properly customized to fit the needs or the site's users. Not every site needs three ugly columns or every bit of information on the front-page. It can be used to show timely information to user. I do wish some sites had much better entry pages to their communities and the owners actually put some effort into them. If you're not than just use the default anyway.

 

I do not like portals at all. I would much rather build a custom CMS system to truncate posts into the home page.

 

Portals are bad unless they're well designed. It cannot just be a stock page that you've done nothing with other than put it up - it has to be useful and easy to follow for every user. There are a lot of poorly-designed portals out there that are completely atrocious and simply confusing, and that's exactly not what you want to show to new visitors.

Personally, I don't use a portal. I've built an entire website beyond the forums, which makes a portal useless, in my opinion. While the website does have a few portal-like aspects, those being latest news on the index and a consistent user bar throughout the site and forums, those are for highlighting recent happenings with our ongoing competition and to make the website easier to use (respectively), not to bring any additional activity to the forums.

 

I absolutely agree.

On the vBa site, there is a showcase of some customized portal pages that would blow your mind away. I'm like "How'd you DO that"

 

I have a portal for my newest site, Bird is the Word, but not for Setsou Design. Reason being, there's an attached blog that's for Setsou Design. We consider that our portal.

I have the portal for Bird is the Word just to list announcements and recent happenings. I like the whole idea of a portal because when users/guests come to your site, they can get a quick look at a recent announcement without going to the forums - this, generally saves time and is VERY convenient!

Besides, your site's niche has to be portal worthy. Setsou Design isn't really portal worthy. More guests come for graphic work than to enjoy the community. Don't get me wrong here, we have a nice/active community but yeah; more traffic to the main site. OTOH, Bird is the Word is a community, simple.

So it depends...

You can ask many different people and get many different answers...

Make sense?

 

It may just be me, but on a majority of the forums I visit that use a portal, especially vBadvanced, I have trouble finding the link to the forum index... sometimes for a good minute or so. Sometimes I can never find the actual link and just make my way to the forum listing another way.

 

They sometimes "hide" the link to the actual forums - it's not only you.

 

Glad to see somebody understands this! Far too many people throw up the default vBa CMPS home page and don't make any changes to it. Really they should think of the default home page as an example of what can be done with CMPS and that the product should be used as foundation to build their own unique pages.

 

I like the ideas of portals, however too many people just install something like vbadvanced and leave all these default modules there (why show a calendar if no one uses it?) and so it's just worthless.

I have just a homepage for our site. It has our Mission Statement on it and a few tidbits of site news that I feel the users may want to know. It also has a list of the lastest torrents on the bottom, but for an introduction page, I want them to see our Mission Statement first.

 

I didn't say I didn't play around with it, I just always prefer a site when one is needed and no portal if not needed as it is only a page on which most people will just look for the "Forum" button and click it and just ignore the content of the page anyway.

 

Take a look at the BIG sites, like CNet. They have several sites and a forum mixed in there somewhere.

I think a lot of it depends on "what" kind of information your going to be posting in the portal, how often your going to keep it updated, how good is the quality of the information,,,,,.

I have 2 domain names on related topics. One is a wordpress blog, the other is a vbulletin forum. The wordpress blog acts as a portal to the forum. Traffic that goes from the blog to the forum has around an 8% bounce rate. Its my forums #1 source of targeted traffic.

When done properly, a portal and a forum can play nice with each other. But I think a lot of it depends on the amount of time you want to put into the project.

 

Well, my primary page is the forum, so the Portal's not much more than a side-attraction...but it's where I keep the chat, just in case...other than that, I have it programmed to update with announcements...it's there, but I don't put much emphasis on it...