portal

A Web site that serves as a starting point to other destinations or activities on the Web. Initially thought of as a home base with links to other sites in the same subject area, portals now attempt to provide all of a user's Internet needs, in one location. Pioneered by Yahoo!, portals aggregate other people's content. MSN and AOL are also popular Web portals.

For example, portals commonly provide services such as e-mail, online chat rooms, games, shopping, searching, content, newsfeeds, travel information, stock quotes, horoscopes, weather, and so on. Portals grew out of the technology inherent with the Internet and are an excellent example of how to take advantage of "user loyalty" via sticky content.

Additional definitions include these: A personal portal is a site on the Web that typically provides personalized capabilities to its visitors, providing a pathway to other content (such as Invesor's Business Daily). It is designed to use distributed applications, different numbers and types of middleware and hardware to provide services from a number of different sources. Business portals are designed to share collaboration in workplaces (for example SharePoint). A business-driven requirement of portals is that the content be able to work on multiple platforms such as personal computers, PDAs, and cell phones.