e commerce and e business 2 (a) Enlist and explain types of portals with an example of each types?

Types of portals:

The portals can be differentiated on the basis of their content and intended users. There are different types of portals; it is important to know what type of portal you want to build. They can be categorized into:

• Vertical Portal

• Horizontal Portal

• Marketplace portals

• Search portals

• Media Portals

• Access Portal

• Geographical Portals

1.Vertical Portal:

• These are web portals which focus only on one specific industry, domain or vertical. Vertical portals provide tools, information, articles, research and statistics on the specific industry or vertical.

• As the web has become a standard tool for business. There are innumerable possibilities for establishing special vertical portals on the market. A vertical portal covers a particular market such as construction with news and other services.

Examples:

Construction Plus (www.constructionplus.com)

Chem Industry (www.chemindustry.com)

2. Horizontal Portal:

• These are web portals which focus on a wide array of interests and topics. They focus on general audience and try to present something for everybody.

• Horizontal portals try act as an entry point of a web surfer into the internet, providing content on the topic of interest and guiding towards the right direction to fetch more related resources and information.

Examples:

Yahoo (www.yahoo.com)

MSN (www.msn.com)

3. Marketplace portals:

• Market space portals exist to support the business-to-business and business-to-customer e-commerce, software support for e-commerce transactions and ability to find and access rich information about the products on sale also, ability to participate in discussion groups with other vendors and/or buyers. They may be vertical, horizontal or geographical in type.

Example:

EC21 (www.ec21.com)

eBay (www.eBay.com)

4. Search portals:

Search portals aggregate results from several search engines into one page. Here the main focus is on search.

Example:

Google (www.google.com)

Ask Jeeves (www.ask.com) .

5. Media Portals:

Media portals focus on entertainment, business or consumer news. Popular media portals update users on current news, affairs and information. Some media portals provide access to local and foreign TV programs such as soap operas, sports and live events.

Examples:

BBC (www.bbc.co.uk)

Guardian (www.guardian.co.uk)

6. Access Portal:

Access portal can be defined as a type of portal associated with Internet Service Provider (ISP).

Examples:

Wanadoo (www.wanadoo.com) and now (www.orange.co.uk)

AOL (www.aol.com)

7. Geographical Portals:

Geographical portal can be either horizontal or vertical portal.

Examples:

Craiglist (www.craiglist.com)

Countyweb (www.countyweb.com)