Portal or no Portal?

Do you use a portal or some other sort of static pages on your site? What does this page consist of? How do your users respond - do they like it or not?

Some people really despise portals with forums...

 

I'm one of them. Especially when I can't find the little "forum" link on the portal.

If you have a forum, only a forum, it should be a forum. You don't need a portal or a splash page before your content. The majority of them don't have anything useful on them either. Forum statistics, latest announcements, a calendar, your own welcome box/avatar - everything you can get if you just went directly to the forum index.

Unless used to build an actual website and not even appear to be a portal mod, portals are a complete turnoff for me.

 

I'm not a portal type of guy, I've tried vB Advanced a couple of times on my DJ Board from member feedback it was useless. I'm going to say unless something like vBa is highly customized, it's just duplicating information, thus pretty much useless.. No offense to the vBa people out there. For now my domain's homepage remains just a regular forum index.

I'd really like to have a nice front end, and considered using Wordpress but then having to have the theme developed to match would be a major PITA so I figured I'll wait until 4.0 is released, when I'm probably going to have a new style done anyhow, and see what the CMS offers in so far as putting up a nice genuine homepage. Sans that I'll customize forumhome with a nice side bar, and continue using Web Templates for static content.

 

I'm not a huge fan of portals, but I think they can provide good information before you enter a forum. For example important news and announcements, and also most portals allow easy creation and integration of custom pages, which is something I like.

 

hit the nail on the head.

nothing more to say.

 

Well since portal simply means doorway, every site has a portal. Even if your homepage is similar to: AdminAddict Forum - Resources for Forum Administrators

The portal page should give an overview of the site. I personally think most communities should give their entries more though. Its less about using some addon to creating a blog like home page or a three-column layout than providing useful and worthwhile information to a visitor.

Look at this community portal:
SitePoint Forums: Resources, Design, HTML, CSS, PHP, ASP, MySQL and more for your web site.

The focus is on recent trending topics and not categorization. They don't have to show that each forum has XXX posts because the focus is on the discussion. Numbers follow. If you're a member, under the featured discussions it will show the threads that you last viewed and participated in. This gives you an easy jumping point to pick up where you left off on a previous visit.

In my opinion, every site should customize their entry page so that it is unique and draws new people into the site. It doesn't matter whether you use a tool like Wordpress such as is used on this site, the forum software's default generated page, or some specific portal addon. Just tossing it up without modification makes it look generic. The trick is to rise above the crowd and stand out.

 

Most sites don't necessarily need a homepage. Especially community/chat-type sites.
Most business sites should have a homepage, imo. No it should not be a duplicate of the forum with login, recent posts, forum stats etc etc.

I wanted to give visitors to my site a reason to want to come on in. I have very detailed navigation area, client feedback, free styles-at-a-glance, etc. All designed to not only draw the visitor inside, but to different areas/pages of the site.

 

To be honest, I think it really does depend on the subject matter of the community. Generally, however, I find portals to be a bit of an annoyance - UNLESS they are being used to organize content.

 

Homepages and/or Portals are not for the benefit of the frequent or repeat visitor. People that visit your site often will have their own bookmark that takes them where they want to go.

However for the newcomer, they can give a quick overview of the site and information about what the site is about as well as a glimpse of the content available. This is how they should be built. You have 8 seconds to turn a visitor into a user. If I have to try to figure out what the site is about, read the different forum descriptions or wade through an entire screen of advertising before I even see content, than I am going to hit my back button and go to the next search result. I am sure that I am not the only one in this regard.

 

Sounds like most posts here hit the nail on the head. I think that, if used properly, the portal is a good way to draw attention to important posts like announcements. I rarely look at portals myself, I'd rather bypass them all together and move directly to content. That being said, all my forums currently have portals <_<

 

So do mine. It's kind of strange that I hate them. :p

 

In the past, I used vBAdvanced as a portal to keep all forum news in a single central place. We usually have various contests and events going on, so I figured it would be easy for members to see the latest happenings all in once place, and they kinda liked it. But I wasn't a fan of it and didn't have time to update it (it was all manual) so I took it down.

It wasn't the entrance/landing page, as - like most of you guys - I think it's pointless to have a portal of forum stats, latest threads, etc. I can find all of this information on the forum.

 

Yep. All information can be found by using something called the "search function". It's an amazingly useful tool.

 

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It specifically talks about the importance of a homepage or portal compared to other pages.

 

I personally really dislike portals, I tried vbAdvance several times but always ended up removing it as it was adding new just bloat to the forum.

 

I agree, I don't want those stats to be shown on the portal. So I hide them from guests. If my members really want to see today's birthdays or who is online, they have to wait until they've actually logged in.

My portal pages can be pretty minimalistic for guests, but I do take the opportunity to pull the titles of my recent threads (and on one site I pull them from an articles forum) into one place. Links leading directly to threads can't be a bad thing, right?

As for trusting people to rely on the search function, I have two problems with that. The vB search is useless (hopefully this is being addressed in 4.0) and the second reason may be even more important. The average forum user struggles trying to figure out how to start a new thread or post a reply. We're all used to how everything works, so it's just second nature to us. Now, imagine you are a middle-age individual that just turned your first computer on this afternoon. See the difference?

Before I add any functionality to my sites, I always go through them and make them as dummy-proof as possible. And people still get hung up. So I try to make things as simple as possible.

 

Any particular reason you say the vB search is useless?

 

People don't understand how it works. This includes administrators and users.

They expect the default search to be boolean and whereas it is boolean or based. This often returns results that are completely unrelated. However Google works the same way when you have multiple keywords. Add to this many administrators often turn off Natural Language searching so phrased based with keywords in quotes don't work. Some people think that Natural Language is more resource intensive than Boolean when it is actually lighter because its less precise.

Its all about learning how to use the search engine engine though. Personally, I can usually find exactly what I am looking for on a vBulletin with the proper query and limitations in place through the advanced search. Quick Search bypasses a lot of these and returns overly broad results.

 

Other than the fact it is, you mean?

It is a resource-intensive pig, first of all. And on older, established forums using Google to search will often produce better results.

It is my understanding this is a problem being addressed in 4.0 and in my not-so-humble opinion, it is not a moment too soon.