Common web portals are the giants that almost everyone has hear of AOL, Yahoo!, and Google. These portals all allow you to log in, check email, chat, check the weather and other personalized information without logging out or leaving the portal.

Along with the above mentioned portals which are personal portals meant for use on personal computers, hand held devices, and phones there are other kinds of portal designs for corporate purposes. A corporate web portal design is one that is set up to provide a similar type of service but within the boundaries of a corporate website. These web portal designs work by integrating the needs of an employee or costumers and making that information available and easy to access. For example, employees might need to access costumer data, warehouse information, emails, and emeetings. These needs could all be met by using corporate web portal design. In this way an employee could log in once and have access to everything they need and limited access to things that they don’t need. Some of these corporate web portals can also link to vendors that the employee might need either to augment their service to costumer or for supply purposes.

The same type of web portal design can be used for costumers too. Think of this as something along the lines of Amazon.com. A customer can log on and access their personal account information. They can view their history and be lead to products that match up with their purchase history. They can also purchase products that link to accompanying products while still using their regular account for purchases and shipping.