In a classic Web site design project, whether or not the client knows in advance what they want their site to look like, there are usally relatively confining factors that dictate the style the site will take. And the client more often than not is in control of the site's content and layouts.

When design a corporate or educational web portal, the content is often managed by multiple players (ie. departments) and the portal by its nature is a many headed beast with different sets of pages for different audiences. Designing a web portal therefore requires a much more flexible mindset from the outset in order to be able to handle the multiplicity of possibilities to be encounted during the design, develop and deploy process of the web site project. The design of a web content portal has to contain enough flexibility to adjust for clients' and users' quite often conflicting needs and yet still maintain enough structured to be able to adapt to an ever growing universe of textual and visual elements. A well designed web portal should also be engaging, empowering and even enlightening and yet not bog the users down with rigid coding which might be difficult to maintain or costly to adjust.

There are a few core elements to consider when putting together a guideline for designing a web portal. The first and practically easiest element to manage is cascading style sheet (css) which enables global modifications from one file addjustment. By using css rendering of the html fonts and images, our programmers provide a sitewide sense of flexibility rather than inserting colors and images directly into pages. Customers can access CSS files to quickly change the appearance of a site. In fact, template based sites that utilize css rendering give you the opportunity to have multiple themes on a site which can be selected simply by choosing one CSS file over another. It's pretty interesting actually how easy this is to accomplish once you get into the swing of things. One of our goals as portal solution providers is to give our clients designs and coding that can be easily modified - even by a not so sophisticated web or graphic designer.

Without getting into too much technical detail, let's just say that if you are looking for a web portal for your business, your city, your non-profit, or your membership based organization, consider calling LaDezign first to see what options are available. We've got our hands quite dirty during the first decade of the 21st century working for a variety of clients like Chambers of Commerce, non-profit institutiions and religious organizations and if we can make this variety of clients happy (not to mention all our ecommerce and business clients), then we certainly are worth you filling out one of our request forms to get more information on how we can craft a personalized web solution for you.