Proven Portals: Best Practices for Planning, Designing, and Developing Enterprise Portals

Chapter One. Creating Frameworks for Organizing Information

Portal designers can learn much from architects and builders. Well-designed buildings are easy to use and structurally sound. We can find what we want, components like doors and windows appear in logical places, and, most importantly, the building stands up over time. We cannot go into a building and find the structural integrity the same way we can find the heating and ventilation units or the corner office. Structural integrity is a property of the way the building was designed and constructed; it is not a single feature added at some point in the construction process. The structural integrity of a portal is similar to that of a building. It is a fundamental property of the portal ...