The Mobile Developer

Do Portals Exclude Mobile Users?

If I had to choose, I'd say that The buzzword of the moment is portal. Although there's no universal definition, you can say that a portal is a website that amalgamates information from various sources (internal or external) to form a focused entrypoint to the internet or an intranet. Portals often offer additional services such as email, forums and chat rooms. Their goal is to either provide a starting point for all customer/supplier interactions with a particular company or else simply to drive traffic to a site in order to sell products and/or generate ad revenue. But do portals exclude mobile users?

There are two kinds of portals. One is the static portal, in which most of the information consists of "static" web pages. The original Yahoo! index and search engine is a good example of a static portal. The second kind of portal is the dynamic portal, where most of the information is generated dynamically out of one or more databases. The portal user can easily personalize the portal's content. An example of a dynamic portal is Slashdot. Note that the line between static and dynamic portals isn't fixed, since all portals usually have both static and dynamic content associated with them. It's the ratio that determines whether a portal can be classified as static or dynamic. Not surprisingly, the big database companies are getting into the business of providing the infrastructure for dynamic portals. My own employer, Sybase, promotes its Enterprise Portal solution, and the other companies are pitching competing solutions.

One problem with portals is that they often assume you're connected to a network and that you're using a web browser. If you're a mobile user, this may not be the case. You might be running your laptop on an airplane, for example. Or you might be running an offline browser on your Palm organizer. Or maybe you're using a microbrowser on your cellphone but the network charges are so expensive that you really want to minimize the amount of data that gets transferred to you. Some of these problems can be alleviated by having the portal support WAP (see my previous column), but a dynamic portal may not be usable offline.

For a portal to be browseable offline, its pages have to be cacheable. CacheFlow, who build and sell Internet caching "appliances", has a neat page on their site about cache-friendly web design. Not only do they talk about how to make your web pages cacheable, they also provide a free tool that you can use to check the cacheability of an arbitrary URL. Run this tool on a number of portals and you'll see that there's quite a variance in cacheability.

Dynamically-generated web pages are rarely marked as being cacheable, even though in many cases the content could be cached. You should make an effort to make as many of your pages cacheable as you can, even if all the pages on your site are dynamic. CacheFlow gives you some good instructions on how to do this. As well, you should consider reducing your reliance on cookies and password authorization, as these generally hinder cacheability.

There's an interesting side-effect to making your website accessible offline: the changes can make your website respond more quickly, because the server has less work to do and because any proxy servers down the line will be able to cache the pages. Just thinking about how to make your site cacheable can also lead you to reducing your site's complexity, which benefits not only offline users but also wireless (small device) and physically challenged users.

So portals don't have to exclude mobile users. There are some things in a portal that require that the user be connected, but you should try to keep it at a minimum. If you have the time, you might even want to consider providing a "micro" version of your portal specifically aimed at mobile users.