Subscribe to RSSWeb Portal Creation Step-by-Step Guide
Are you ready to create a web portal? If your answer is yes, then you are in the right place. So, what is a web portal? *A web portal presents information from diverse sources in a unified way.
There are many types of web portals. I am going to discuss here a simple but effective way of creating a basic information-driven (content) portal. Here is a brief disclaimer. Any companies mentioned in this post are not a must, but simply a guideline.
There are 3 basic steps to follow to create your very own web portal. Step 1, registering the domain. Step 2, getting a web hosting service. Step 3, installing a web portal CMS (content management system).
Step 1: Let’s start with the domain name registration. Go to a registrar like godaddy.com and register your domain name for a low, low fee (around $10 for a year).
Step 2: Web hosting service is also available as an add-on package to your domain registration with a company like GoDaddy. Since I already decided which web portal application I want to use, I need to make sure that the hosting service can run it. The minimum requirements I want to have available are “running on a linux server, PHP, and MySQL databases”. Most of the packages include all three and more, so I can go for now with the lowest monthly charge package which costs about $5 per month when paid monthly. If you pre-pay a full year you get a discount.
Note: For many years I have used a godaddy checkout discount code that gives a 10% discount on your final bill. The code is SAVETEN and you can enter it once you are ready to pay for the services on their page.
Step 3: Installing the portal CMS. Once your hosting account is ready, go to your hosting account control panel and click on “manage account”. Then click on “Your Applications” and click on “Content Management” to open that category. The CMS you will install is called Joomla. Joomla is a powerful CMS that is available for free and can be used to administer your new portal content without having to write a single line of code, quickly. Once you select to install Joomla, just follow the step-by-step process and a few minutes later, your web portal will be ready to be visited. You can create as many channels (sections) on your portal as you need to. One of the many great advantages of this CMS is that you can modify the look of the site independently from the content with a single click and there are thousands of free templates on the Internet to choose from. Installing a template on the site is also a simple operation.
For more information on Joomla, go to their web site at http://www.joomla.org and their official documentation site http://docs.joomla.org/
If you would like to have a profesional get you started, feel free to contact me and I can get your new portal site running in a matter of minutes for a reasonable and very much worth it low fee.
I wish you the best on your new journey to owning your very first web portal.
*Definition as found in wikipedia.org
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Creating a Portal Site (…a caveman can do it)
The mysteries of creating a web portal are no longer mysteries. If you can read, follow instructions and have a decent understanding of web development basics (no need to be a programmer), you can do it.
The problem is that once you have a decent portal site, you need traffic to start considering making it successful. In some web portals, that issue is not a problem because many big sites have a money machine behind them like TV networks. All they have to do is plug the site in their channel and they automatically have tons of web traffic. It doesn’t matter if the site itself sucks, at least they can generate traffic, and with traffic comes money in many different forms, like advertising.
There are also big companies that don’t have a problem with generating traffic on their site, because they already have a loyal customer base, like FedEx. Their site is not just a promotional tool, it has become a need for their clients to track packages.
But let’s talk about the creation of a portal site. The first thing you need, of course, is a domain name. First you can go to your preferred registrar and register your unique domain name (like mine, rafaelsantoni.com). The registration rates nowadays run so low, that there is no excuse not to have your own domain name. I have found registration rates as low as $5 for a full year. Then, you need to hire a web hosting service. Most of the registrars also offer web hosting, so my advice is that if you don’t have your own web server, get it from them.
The next thing you need to do is the planning of your site. How many “channels” (sections) will it have? What will be the content inside each “channel”, and any additional features besides content that the web site will have available to its visitors.
Once you are clear on all the details, it’s time to build it. “If you build it, they will come”. Well, not really, but I couldn’t resist quoting the movie “Angels in the Outfield”. Anyway… To build your portal, you must, I repeat, you must use a CMS. What is a CMS? CMS is short for Content Management System. This is the kind of application that will allow you to generate all that great content you want people to access without having to write a single line of code.
Your CMS will be the interface between your creative genius and the web page being displayed. There are many CMS’s out there. Some are very expensive, some are free. I found that when it comes to CMS there isn’t really a big advantage on paying hundreds or in some cases even thousands of dollars when there are free solutions that will work as well.
I personally have a few favorites, but I won’t mention any of them just yet. When you decide to create your portal, make sure that you do a good planning for the content, it will be the life of the site. Fresh content is key to keep visitors coming back for more, thus creating better chances of selling advertising on the site.
I know that this is very little information, but I am going to keep it short for the moment. If you want some help or advice to create your own portal, feel free to contact me. I will be more than glad to assist you or your company to do it right. If I receiev a few requests about this subject, I will write another post with more details.
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My Social Media Top Sites
There are many lists out on the Internet with what they consider the top social media sites. Here are the ones I consider the top 5. The order of the list is simply alphabetical.
- Facebook.com
- Linkedin.com
- Myspace.com
- Twitter.com
- Youtube.com
Now, why are these my top five? Here’s why. Unless you have lived under a rock or inside a cave for the past few years you definitely have heard about at least one of them. Everybody and their mother has a profile in at least one. The few that don’t, eventually will. Wikipedia describes my top five like this.
Facebook is a free-access social networking website that is operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. Users can join networks organized by city, workplace, school, and region to connect and interact with other people. People can also add friends and send them messages, and update their personal profiles to notify friends about themselves. The website’s name refers to the paper facebooks depicting members of a campus community that some US colleges and preparatory schools give to incoming students, faculty, and staff as a way to get to know other people on campus.
LinkedIn is a business-oriented social networking site founded in December 2002 and launched in May 2003 mainly used for professional networking. As of February 2009[update], it had more than 35 million registered users, spanning 170 industries.
MySpace is a social networking website with an interactive, user-submitted network of friends, personal profiles, blogs, groups, photos, music, and videos for teenagers and adults internationally. Its headquarters are in Beverly Hills, California, USA, where it shares an office building with its immediate owner, Fox Interactive Media; which is owned by News Corporation, which has its headquarters in New York City. In June 2006, MySpace was the most popular social networking site in the United States. According to comScore, MySpace was overtaken internationally by main competitor Facebook in April 2008, based on monthly unique visitors. The company employs 300 staff and does not disclose revenues or profits separately from News Corporation. The 100 millionth account was created on August 6, 2006 in the Netherlands and the site counted approximately 106 million accounts on September 8, 2006.
Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read other users’ updates known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 bytes in length. Updates are displayed on the user’s profile page and delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them. Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends (delivery to everyone being the default). Users can send and receive updates via the Twitter website, SMS, RSS (receive only), or through applications such as Tweetie, Twitterrific, Twitterfon, TweetDeck and Feedalizr. The service is free to use over the web, but using SMS may incur phone services provider fees.
As of March 2009, Twitter has received more visibility and popularity worldwide. Twitter is often described as the ‘SMS of Internet’ in that the site provides the back-end functionality (via its APIs) to other desktop and web-based applications to send and receive short text messages often obscuring the actual website itself. This extensibility of the service has earned it more popularity than it would have garnered if users had to visit the site to use the service.
Four gateway numbers are currently available for SMS: short codes for the United States, Canada, and India, and a United Kingdom-based number for international use. Several third parties offer posting and receiving updates via email.
Estimates of the number of daily users vary as the company does not release the number of active accounts. In November 2008, Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester Research estimated that Twitter had 4-5 million users. A February 2009 Compete.com blog entry ranks Twitter as the third largest social network (MySpace would be second and Facebook would be the largest in the world), and puts the number of unique monthly visitors at roughly 6 million and the number of monthly visits at 55 million.
YouTube is a video sharing website where users can upload, view and share video clips. Three former PayPal employees created YouTube in February 2005. In November 2006, YouTube, LLC was bought by Google Inc. for US$1.65 billion, and is now operated as a subsidiary of Google. The company is based in San Bruno, California, and uses Adobe Flash Video technology to display a wide variety of user-generated video content, including movie clips, TV clips, and music videos, as well as amateur content such as video blogging and short original videos. Most of the content on YouTube has been uploaded by individuals, although media corporations including CBS and the BBC and other organizations offer some of their material via the site.
Unregistered users can watch the videos, while registered users are permitted to upload an unlimited number of videos. Accounts of registered users are called “channels”.
Videos that are considered to contain potentially offensive content are available only to registered users over the age of 18. The uploading of videos containing defamation, pornography, copyright violations, and material encouraging criminal conduct is prohibited by YouTube’s terms of service.
The information above can be found in Wikipedia but it is not the only soucre of information of each one of the social sites listed. Go to each one and see for yourself what they are. However, I have to point out one very strong personal opinion I have of one of the sites listed. Twitter. I personally think that Twitter is probably one of the most overrated social sites in the planet and the only reason for it success is its very catchy name.
Viral Marketing for All
It doesn’t matter if you are a pro blogger or if you simply write whatever comes to mind for the sake of killing some time, now anyone can take advantage of an incredible marketing tool.
There are many millions of sites running WordPress as their blogging engine. WordPress.com alone has over 4 million blogs alone. So chances are that when you are reading a blog, it is running on WordPress.
Now to the good stuff. I found a WordPress plug-in to integrate any blog with Facebook. The plug-in allows your visitors to post comments on your blog by allowing them to log on using their Facebook account. That means that they don’t have to create a new identityfor your site or for multiple sites using Facebook Connect. A universal log-in.
When a visitor posts a comment in your blog, if they were logged on into their Facebook profile, their post will automatically display their “avatar” and provide a link to contact them via Facebook directly. While a lot of people might be concerned about users privacy, keep in mind that any sensitive information of the user remains in their Facebook profile, not in the blog.
This provides a better way to promote your site’s content. Anyone with a Facebook account can reccomend your posts to their Facebook friends the same way they do it when they are on the Facebook site.
If one of your visitors has 150 friends, and she reccomends your blog to 5 friends, and they reccomend it to 5 friends, and they all do the same thing, you will have hundreds if not thousands or readers soon.
Try it it here, you’ll see how easy and safe it is.
What to do with unconfirmed eMail opt-ins?
When one of your site visitors registers to receive eMail communications from you, you should try to use a double opt-in mechanism.
What is a double opt-in? That’s when the user registers and has to confirm her eMail address by clicking on a link sent by eMail. Once the user clicks on the unique link, her eMail address gets flagged as confirmed. This avoids registering eMail addresses with typos and bogus registrations.
Consider that at the time a user decides to register, many things can go wrong. Maybe your confirmation eMail went to SPAM and they never saw it, or maybe they just didn’t complete the process. Now, what should you do with those registrations that never got confirmed?
You may want to send a courtesy reminder to confirm their registration. With this strategy you accomplish two things. First, you get to remove any eMails that are not valid (bounces). Second, you get to activate those new addresses that for some reason never got confirmed.
However, keep one thing in mind, if the registration attempt happened a long time ago, don’t bother to send the reminder. At the end, at least to me, an old eMail address that has never been used is as good as not having an address at all.
What I recommend is to do a unconfirmed registrations clean up at least once a month.
Emailing subscribers that have not been mailed for over a year
While it is not illegal in the United States, it’s generally not a good idea because it is likely to hurt your sender reputation by generating a spike in bounces and spam complaints. Internet service providers see this as irresponsible mailing practices. There are three dangers in emailing an old list: (1) People change their email addresses so the older a list is the more likely it is to contain inactive and dead addresses that will produce bounces. (2) Some of those inactive/dead addresses may have been turned into “honey pots” by ISPs. If you send email to a honey pot, ISP find this behavior to be similiar to what a real spammer may do and therefore block your email. And (3) the longer you go without emailing a subscriber the more likely they are to forget that they gave you permission to email them, and therefore the more likely they are to mark your email as spam. The overarching truth here is that permission expires if unused. At a certain point you have to abandon unused addresses. Be aware that laws outside of the U.S. vary on this issue.
If you already established a good reputation as an email marketer, you should avoid at all costs to send emails to a segment that you have not mailed for a long period of time.
Email Regulations FTC Site
The Federal Trade Commission has more than one source of information online in regards to eMail marketing practices. If you need to get your hands on the latest rules and regulations go to:
I know a lot of the information seems dated but what they have is the latest and greatest enforcement of the rules. Remember, the FTC is your friend. Comply!
Business Cards
A couple of days ago I received a new set of business cards. A gift from my brother. This weekend I will go to Barcamp Miami and I plan on giving at least 100 cards to key people.
Here’s what they look like.
Business card Front / Back
Testing Emails Before Deployment
Test any offers, email campaign subject and every word of the content ahead of time so you can fix any problems and improve your campaigns before you get to the launch date. Review test messages in different browsers and platforms, review and edit copy, make sure the HTML code is clean and test all links. You should also make sure that your list is as clean as possible.
Don’t forget to re-test until you are sure everything is 100% good. Use new subject lines to make sure that recipients don’t confuse a new mailing with old ones. Compare previous positive campaign results. There is a good chance that a strategy that worked before, might still work . Just make sure it feels fresh and interesting. A good technique to compare campaigns performance is splitting the list in two and using different subjects. There is a good chance that one will perform noticeably better than the other.
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