What is the Difference Between Portal and Website

The main difference between portal and website is that a portal is a special kind of website that works as a gateway to World Wide Web (WWW) to provide services to the users while a website is a collection of related web pages that are addressed relative to a common Uniform Resource Locator (URL).

A portal is a special website that offers resources and services such as emails, forums and search engine capabilities. It provides access to multiple user roles, resources, role-specific functionality and content and improves collaboration. In contrast, a website is a location on the internet that directs to a collection of web pages that are addressed relative to a common URL. A website reaches a target audience. Moreover, it has a focused content that eliminates the need to visit different websites.

Key Areas Covered

1. What is a Portal
     – Definition, Functionality, Features
2. What is a Website
     – Definition, Functionality, Features
3. What is the Difference Between Portal and Website
     – Comparison of Key Differences

Key Terms

Portal, Website, Web Page, URL

What is a Portal

A portal or a web portal is a website that aggregates information from various sources in a consistent and uniform manner. Each information source obtains a dedicated area on the page to display information. There are different kinds of portals such as personal, finance and stock, search, healthcare, government, and corporate protocols. Mainly, there are two types of portals as internal and external portals.  

Internal Portals

Mainly, the organizations use internal portals.  A company uses internal portals to ensure communication and to provide services to employees. It includes upcoming event details, product releases, meeting details and job-related information. In a portal, employees can also exchange information among each other through emails and live messaging. These portals exist within a private network. Therefore, only the authorized users can access it. The user has to enter valid login information to access the portal.

External Portals

Everyone can use an external portal. It works as the starting point for browsing the web. It has links to various articles to simplify the web browsing process. One example of an external portal is Yahoo. It has links to various topics such as news, sports, politics, and, finance. The improvement in search engine has minimized the popularity of portals. Even though a portal is different from a search engine, a portal has search engine capability. For instance, we can consider Yahoo as both, a portal and a search engine.

What is Website

A website is a collection of related web pages. These pages are connected using hyperlinks. Each website has a domain name to identify it. An organization or individuals can maintain websites to inform the customers about their products and services. A website allows the users to log in, register, contact, order products, perform online transactions, send feedbacks, etc. Furthermore, HTML, CSS, JavaScript are common languages for client-side while PHP, Python, ASP.NET are commonly used to develop the backend of the website. 

There are websites available for various categories. E-commerce websites such as Amazon.com and AliExpress are similar to virtual stores. The customers can purchase products and perform online tractions from these websites. Educational websites provide academic support to students. They provide study materials such as tutorials and, videos on various subjects. Social networks such as Facebook and Twitter allow the users to create profiles and to communicate with friends. The media sharing websites allow users to share various media files including video, images, music, etc.

Difference Between Portal and Website

Definition

A portal or a web portal is a specially designed website that brings information from diverse sources like emails, online forums and search engines together in a uniform manner. A website is a collection of related web pages, including multimedia content, typically identified with a common domain name and published on at least one web server. Thus, this definition includes the main difference between portal and website.

Functionality

Portal provides essential services such as search engine capabilities, exchanging emails, links to other related sites and personalized content. Websites allow the user to log in, register, obtain services according to the website type, sending feedbacks, etc. Hence, this is another difference between portal and website.

Conclusion

In brief, the basic difference between portal and website is that a portal is a special kind of website that works as a gateway to World Wide Web (WWW) to provides services to the users while  a website is a collection of related web pages that are addressed relative to a common Uniform Resource Locator (URL).

Reference:

1. “Portal.” P2P (Peer To Peer) Definition, Available here.
2. “Website.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 8 Oct. 2018, Available here.

Image Courtesy:

1. “1624028” (CC0) via Pixabay

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