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Early in this decade portals promised to be the solution to community-centric websites that could effectively organize site content, increase community involvement, and foster customer driven sites. The concept of the portal was to deliver a personalized web experience to the user. Let's face it, as website administrators we like having the work done for us, and portals were a way to hand users exactly what they wanted to see on a platter: all of a site's content in one pretty, simplified package.

Institutions around the world wide web found themselves face to face with a new dilemma: how can our portal deliver the most user-friendly experience? Departments gathered, budgets studied, and committees formed to develop strategic plans to implement portals in the quest to present a best face to the web community. The result? A barrage of portal driven websites, where users find themselves on a landing page faced with friendly graphics and well-intended links to help them navigate the labyrinth of pages they know must contain the information they need ... somewhere.

While personalization is important, and dashboards are viable options, it's time to move forward. There's more to a website than the initial page a user sees, so why is this page the only page that is personalized? The evolution of web publishing and content management systems now brings personalization to an entirely new level, where feature rich sites are able to interact with the user throughout the entire user experience beyond the landing page.

Today, in my opinion, portals are dead. In dead, I certainly don't mean extinct. Portals exist. Everywhere. But are they necessary? It seems like the idea of personalization has been met by preceding every title with the word "My." MyYahoo, My AltaVista, myragingbull.com, myticketmaster.com, mymymy.

Part of the theory of the portal is that users are presented with their own version of a site, when in actuality the content displayed on that site is hardly theirs. Have we really reached a point where this is the best we can do? With today's web technology and publishing capabilities, is it really necessary to present users with a dummy page, full of nothing but headers, titles, graphics, and links? I say no.

Modern content management systems are capable of delivering dynamic user experiences that negate the necessity of the portal. It is now possible, and time and cost effective, to develop sites that actively respond to the user's interests. A user no longer needs to make a single selection from a portal page like a "choose your own adventure" book. Today's websites are capable of recognizing user interest and dynamically generating items of interest and help with very little action required of the user. In today's media weary public, what could be more user friendly? Jane Doe visits a site a couple times a week and finds a topic she enjoys reading about; soon, whenever Jane visits that site she is presented with the very topics of interest she enjoys, which keeps her coming back time and again. Passive profiling streamlines site content for the user, without having to navigate and search through the site each time a visit to the site is made.

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