You don’t have to be Sir Francis Drake to know that navigation is a secret weapon. You can feel the difference between sleek and uninhibited movement nowadays found in a well-designed website and the foundering and unsatisfying feeling you get at any listing or sinking URL. Template #7596 is as good as any savvy ship that sailed under Drake. It’s a stylish and light HTML vortal – or as some say, Vertical Enterprise Portal — featuring a standard left-side menu that leaves no questions about navigation.

Vertical Enterprise Portals are in general very particular things requiring much time, much attention, and much devotion to a single, and usually commercial, idea. Keeping your site fast and easy for visitors to navigate can keep your head above water. Portal sites that fail are those that a) do not help the visitor to locate information and products b) fail to keep the visitor on the site c) give visitors no reason to return. Shopping should take as little time as possible, folks. E-business shops are little more than ethereal grocery stores. There are as many ways to organize shops as there are shops to be organized. The main thing to keep in mind is economy: the economy of time. Speed and convenience sells. Since there is no perfect navigation system, however, your sales will depend on your skills in tweaking out your site to meet the needs of your audience.

Having said enough about vortal navigation, we can return to the main question: what is a vortal?

According to Webopedia, a VORTAL, or Vertical Industry Portal, is a portal Web site that provides information and resources for a particular industry. Vortals are the Internet’s way of catering to consumers’ focused-environment preferences. They typically provide news, research and statistics, discussions, newsletters, online tools, and many other services that educate users about a specific industry.

Indeed, it is believed that as the Web becomes a standard tool for business, vortals will join and maybe replace general portal sites like AOL and Yahoo! as common gateways to the Internet.

For more information on building and running your own vortals and portals, visit these websites.
Portal/Vortal Tutorial
How to Design and Build Compelling Portal Interfaces

Build Your First Portal
Portal and Vortal Development