Web Portals

Building an Online Community

Contents

Vision and Mission Statement 3

Tagline 3

Background 3

Portal Outline 4

User Created Content 4

Web Portal Design 5

Discussion Forums 5

File Hosting 6

Search 6

Conclusion 6

Bibliography 7

Vision and Mission Statement

The vision of Net Gamers Central is to become the paramount community web portal in the world of online gaming, providing large amounts of useful information as well as integral services to the online community. The Net Gamers Central wishes to cater to the needs of everyone in the online community and to become recognized as the forefront in all gaming news, tools and services.

The Mission of Net Gamers Central is to organize the world's online gaming information and make it universally accessible to any user who may request it, as well as providing self service, collaboration, and information aggregation services in order to efficiently resolve all issues and queries that visitors have. The web community that is created should provide information and services that are useful to both current and potential subscribers, and the community within the portal should be founded on trust and honesty, promoting a close and friendly community that will offer further value to their interest in the online gaming world.

Tagline

"Think. Feel. Game."

Background

Net Gamers Central was created to cater to the large demand for an all encompassing web portal within the online gaming genre. It can be seen from reports that the online gaming community tend not to stick to one particular game, as they generally have shorter attention spans, therefore it is obvious that one huge portal that contained information regarding every online game available, as well as services for those games would become a huge success. The portal was then created by a group of avid gamers, who had the technical knowledge to create such a portal that provided all that was promised, while staying true to the original vision and goals set during the early stages of development. Since then the portal has grown and is in the process of implementing a variety of useful features that will be sure to entice the current online gaming demographic to visit the portal.

Portal Outline

Net Gamers Central has been developed with an extremely high level of user input, this seemed to be the most obvious course of action considering the nature of the topic, online gaming, whose success depends on the number of people within the community, the attitude of those people, as well as the competence of the designers creating the software that the community is using. Net Gamers Central has been created to become the paramount web portal with regards to online gaming; by utilizing the many features and applications that have been provided by gaming themed web portals in the past, Net Gamers Central can adopt a follower mentality and implement these ideas, which have been proven to be successful as well as limiting risks and costs associated with developing information technology solutions, and at the same time, utilize information technology to gain a competitive edge and increase the numbers of people in the community.

User Created Content

Web portals since their inception, have been seen primarily as gateways, linking the users to the information that will help them, and providing not much else in terms of features and applications and merely guiding them to the right direction. However, in recent times web portals have evolved beyond a simple gateway and have become certified destinations (Shim, et al, 2006) since they have taken advantage of User-Created-Content (UCC). UCC allows the community itself to cater to the needs of the users, submitting their own answers to any questions that might exist, and allowing the portal to accumulate information, thereby becoming an important information source for any future inquiries and problems that the members of the community require help with. This change has allowed portals to bind the traffic within the portal, rather than designating the traffic to external information sites; a prominent portal for the World of Warcraft, Wowwiki (Rustak, 2004) is a portal that was created purely by UCC, and has grown to be a trusted information source. By adopting elements of UCC, the Onling gaming community web portal can provide all the information that users need, without forcing them to research external information sites, therefore becoming far more self serving and robust.

Web Portal Design

Web portals in the past were seen primarily as gateways as was stated earlier, thereby limiting the creative control administrators could have over the design of the web site. Due to the shift in functionality of web portals however, as well as the added value of UCC, it has become increasingly challenging to design web sites where users can find exactly what they are looking for (Fang, et al, 2004). Prominent gaming portals IGN (Fox Media, 1996), and Gamespot (Deemer, et al, 1996), display the attributes of good web design, limiting the amount of useless hyperlinks, and utilises taxonomy for articles to make them easier for users to access the information they need. Gamespot also allows for a degree of personalisation within the site allowing users to select which background and forum theme they wish to use, whose selection will be stored with the user account information, and this personalisation can help the users feel connected to the portal, thereby ensuring their continued presence (Bellas, et al, 2004). A web portal needs to be designed with aesthetics in mind, as well as accessibility, in order to create interest in the site, without frustrating users, Net Gamers Central will feature a design that keeps all these rules in mind.

Example of Gamespot design.

Discussion

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