Designing Information Portals

Melanie Wood, Raleigh NC
123Triad: Web Design & SEO Company

Designing Information Portals

An information portal is a type of website which, as the name suggests, serves as an information resource. Portals can focus on one topic, such as a sports or gaming website, or be more general like Wikipedia or About.com. Whatever the type, information portals follow a unique set of design rules—one that helps them achieve their goal of sharing information. If you’re out of ideas for your information portal design, read on for some of the most important rules.

Content comes first
Since you’re sharing information, it makes sense to focus on the content of your site, rather than its overall appearance. While both are still relevant, people don’t just go there to look—they come to your site to read. So the first rule is to fill your site with good, relevant content. It’s usually best to build a buffer of content before the site goes live, so you have new material to roll out while you focus on site design.

Readable layouts
Information portals must be laid out so that there is sufficient room to read the content. A lot of personal blogs use “avant-garde” layouts where the blog section is no bigger than 1/5 of the page. This won’t work for a public informational site for two reasons: first, it’s not very inviting to read, and second, it limits the amount of information you can put on the page. Make sure the reading area occupies at least 60% of the page (85% is ideal) and is not obstructed by other visual elements.

Graphic content
No matter how informative your site is, you’re still on the Web—and that means you have to appeal to web standards. Part of this is making your site attractive at first glance. People tend to be put off by large blocks of black-and-white text. What you can do is break up your text into small paragraphs, label them with subheadings, and use images where appropriate. Each page should have at least one graphic element in it to compensate for the “dull” volume of the text.

Navigational access
It’s also important for an information portal to have an accessible menu. Once a user is done with an article, he’ll either want to read more or go back to the home page. Make sure there are appropriate links to these two on every page. You can do this with a static menu bar, or if you have a lot of pages, a site map or drop-down listing all the available content.

123Triad webdesign offers affordable custom website design. Our full service website design company only hires certified website designers. Please contact us today on 1-800-720-0816 for your next web site design project.

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