DIFFERENCE BETWEEN WEBSITE AND WEB-PORTAL

A friend of mine some days ago asked me, “what is the difference between a web portal and website”?  Ordinarily, this kind of question might be something that is going on in the mind of some people and hence the need for this post. To ask, what is the difference between a web portal and a website? Let us look at critically.

A portal is defined in the dictionary as a gateway or an entry point to a grand entrance. A portal is generally a vehicle by which to gain access to a multitude of services via the internet while a website is a destination in to a particular place. Almost everyone thinks he knows what a website is and in a way he is correct. But when people start to talk about a Web portal in the same way as a website, this is where they don’t get it right. Web portal is indeed a type of website, but it is much more in content and services than just a mere website

A website of an organization is a collection of all the facts and information about that company in different Web Pages that are included or contained under a domain name. A website contains text, images and videos. Thus a Web portal, in addition to being a website, also acts as a gateway to the internet for a wide range of services. 

For example www.google.com is
a website but it also acts as a portal. Why? Because it has an array of web-services you can rarely imagine as it gives to you lots of web related issues to delve with. There are many pages that go into making it a website that is also a web portal as you can use it to view web pages, go shopping, play games, read your email, or talk to your friends through charting and much more! A Web portal is not just a website, it is indeed a mother of websites as it contains what ordinarily a website does not have or provide for its users; it allows data retrieval from different sources.

While a Web portal finds information for the users, they themselves have to search for it on a particular website. In other words, yahoo.com and google.com are considered as web portals. For instance, cnbc.com, cnn.com or bbc.com are all considered as websites. You can search for information on a website but it is limited to that company or organization only most times while a web portal itself searches and presents all the information for the users.

In conclusion, a web portal contains arrays of things like forum, e-mail, charting as mentioned before, search engine, shopping mall and many more. Web portal is a public interface; whereas, a website is just to offer a public service  function to the users based on one particular or special information. It is public/private interface for users. It has to be known and noted that a website must be first registered before it can be launched and seen on the internet.




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