For bigger companies, designing a website may not be enough; you might need a whole web portal design in order to accomplish the needs of your company that you are looking to accomplish. The difference between a web portal and a website is in the size and the type of pages that are produced. For example, an intranet is one type of web portal design, which can be used by companies to connect all of their employees to common information and services. Another type of web portal is a site such as Yahoo which has many different sites within it. For larger companies and organizations, a developer portal website design might be the way to go.

Ecommerce Web Site Design Portal
If you are working on developing a quite large e-business, you might want to consider developing a portal and not just a website. Think of a portal in the sense of a doorway; a portal online is a doorway through which an entire network of sites can be reached. If you are looking to put a vast amount of selling sites on the net, a portal is probably a better way to go than a simple website.

Website and portal design can sometimes be done by one and the same person. However, some website developers do not have the necessary knowledge to do web portal design in addition to simple website design. The fact remains that web portal development is much more complicated than simply developing website pages. Developing a web portal requires a lot more specialized knowledge that not every programmer or designer will possess.

Knowledge Needed
In order to engage in successful portal web site design, there are a lot more pieces to the puzzles than being able to design graphics and being able to code pages to interface with one another. Knowledge of how to work a server and how to host everything through the server, how much power is necessary, etc. are all additional knowledge that a web portal software development project requires in addition to basic web development capabilities.

All of this additional knowledge that is needed for good web portal design can be found in many professionals who specialize in designing larger projects online. Such companies and independent contractors bill themselves as specialized not only in website but also in web portal design. Don’t expect a common web developer to be able to design and host a portal; make sure that the professional you are hiring is capable of effectively designing and coding a web portal design that meets your needs.