I attended a portal solution preview recently. The solution supposedly allows a webmaster to build your own web page easily and at a very low cost. The solution is called MyPortal. They claim, MyPortal is the first user friendly D.I.Y. portal in the world. Pretty bold claim I might say.

How true is the claim? I’ve no idea. I guess it depends pretty much on their definition of a user friendly DIY portal.

MyPortal is a web hosting package provided by Edorey, the company behind Portal Whizz.

Basically, MyPortal runs on the Portal Whizz CMS engine. MyPortal is thus, the baby sized package of Portal Whizz.

Following is the package comparison:

The portal engine running in the backend is actually based on fullxml which was once developed by John Roland and Marc Chouteau. The last stable production release of fullxml was in 2002. I guess, the code behind Portal Whizz right now is probably based on that stable release.

MyPortal’s engine runs on an XML database backend. This is among the reason why they can offer a very cheap CMS package to the masses. It’s Windows based, however, thus a Windows Web Server license would still be required.

I have yet to take a look at the source of the backend engine. Will take a brief look at it soon. I can only take a look at the old fullxml source, though. The current engine is no longer open source it seems. They also claim, they were part or the fullxml development team way back then.

Following are a few of the positive aspects of MyPortal Package which I think deserves to be highlighted.

Webmaster Friendly Admin Interface

I have to admit, the backend administration interface is very user friendly. I’ve tried my hands on a number of CMS products before. Nothing compares to the ease of use of the Portal Whizz backend. Yes, you name it, I’ve done Mambo, Joomla, XOOPS, Drupal,  and DotNetNuke. I’ve played with them at one time or another. They all have a pretty complicated backend that needs a couple of months to master.

The Portal Whizz backend, on the other hand, takes just a few hours, at most, of tinkering to master. To make things even easier for a newbie webmaster, once the portal layout and content has been initialized, the webmaster can maintain the contents directly from the administrator’s front end.

Take a peek at the Admin Home Page included here. The red squares at the side of the Page and Article titles are Edit Points. Administrators need only to click on these red squares to edit the respective content item.

Complete Portal Package

Take a look at the modules included in the Portal Whizz package. They’ve got:

• Newsletter
• Forum
• SiteMap
• Guest Book
• Directory
• Knowledgebase Manager
• Internal Messaging
• RSS and SEO
• Daily Quotes
• Visitor Stats and Tracking
• Surveys and Polls
• Forms Manager
• Multimedia Gallery
• Classified Ads
• Calendar
• Upload Manager
• Download Manager
• Member Manager
• Banner Manager
• Themes and Skins

I don’t really know the exact implementation details of all the modules. However, from the names of the lot, I’d say they pretty much cover almost everything one needs to run a full fledge portal of some kind. All a webmaster needs to do once they login into their portal is to turn those modules on and they should be up and running.

Of course, some tweaking, tuning, and initializing needs to be done on some of the modules. The Forum needs to have some initial Topics and threads, the Classified Ads need some categories, Newsletters need to be created, etc. The thing is, for a newbie webmaster without any technical background, this is not too hard a task to perform. If compared to running other types of CMSes, Portal Whizz provides an ultimately easy administrative experience for the webmaster.

Too bad, they don’t offer all the modules into the MyPortal package. So, if you are getting the MyPortal package, be aware that you only get a portion of the modules available for the more expensive Portal Whizz Packages.

Pricing unmatched for a portal solution

MyPortal offers probably the cheapest portal solution around. At RM50 per year, I don’t think there is any other cheaper offer around. By offering a solution at RM50 per year, MyPortal will certainly be attracting a whole lot of interest from small businesses who have been thinking about entering the internet scene.

Let’s see now. RM50 per year. That’s roughly about RM4.15+ a month. Less than RM0.15 per day. Any business out there can’t afford to spend RM0.15 a day for internet exposure?

As with everything else in the real world, things can’t be all positive right? Certainly. The MyPortal offering do have some kinks in it. Following I detail a few which I’ve encountered.

DNS management

I deem DNS Management a crucial part of a hosting package. Granted, the MyPortal and Portal Whizz Premium packages come with only a subdomain. However, using your own domain is an option in the MyPortal package. It also comes standard in the Portal Whizz Super package. The thing is, nowhere in any of the documented materials is there a mention to the extent of domain management that’s provided.

Since, there is no mention anywhere about domain management, I’m assuming here that none is provided. To me, this is something which the company needs to take a look into.

No Blogging Module

There’s a whole lot of modules in the system, however, I don’t see any module specific to blogging. I’d expect that such a module is available in this era of bloggers.

While yes, you can probably just create a page called Blog and create articles in that page. I have a problem with this. When creating articles as contents of a page, the articles are arranged within the page in creation order from top to bottom. Thus, new articles will be inserted towards th bottom of the page. I could not find a way to change this order. Perhaps there may be a way, I don’t know.

The articles also lack any form of tags or categorizations. Two of the most important aspects of a blog. Even Blogspot has now created labels to categorize blog entries.

Ugly URL

In terms of SEO, the page URL plays a part in getting the page to the top spot of the SERP. At present, the URL churned out by the backend engine is pretty much outright ugleeee. There’s no indication to the topic of the content the URL is pointing to. It’s very worm like.

The problem with these type of worm like URLs is search engines don’t really like them. As such, it affects the SERP of the pages. It makes it even harder for the pages to be ranked in the top spots for SERP. Getting a top spot SERP is important for businesses. The higher you are in the SERP, the more traffic you get. Of course, the URL is not the only thing to consider in SEO. It is however, an important part of SEO.

Another problem with this ugly URL is when you view it in a web statistics and tracking report. It’s going to be very hard to identify the page in the stats if the page title is not available. Such is the case with the internal stats report provided in the portal engine. Looking at the report, there is no way I can ascertain which of the many pages in my site is attracting the most visits.

Site based SEO

Most people don’t really understand this. Search engine optimization is page based. It is not site based. When you do SEO, you’ve got to optimize each page for the search engine. Thus, the meta tags must be optimized for each page.

The current implementation of SEO in Portal Whizz is site based. You define meta keywords, meta description and title once for the site. These are then implemented into every page in your site. Basically, in SEO terms, this is the wrong way of doing things.

Naturally, all your pages will not have the relavent content coresponding to the keyword you’ve set for your home page. It is a portal, anyway. What does a portal have? A portal normally contains information on many topics. How can a site based keywords, description and title satisfy the SEO required for a portal?

No control over Adsense placement and type

It’s good that Adsense is included automatically in the package. However, I have a problem with the adsense placement. In addition to that, I can’t seem to add more adsense scripts into the portal. At present, I can see only a single adsense box – at the top of the portal.

I would like to be able to position my adsense ads to my liking. If its possible, I would also like to add a couple more adsense ads into the portal.

I also can’t seem to find a way to change the Google Id associated with the Google Search box. Changing the publisher-id in the Google Adsense settings field does not change the id associated in the Google Search box. Is this a bug in the system? Or is there a different set of settings to change which I did not find?

Conclusion

At first look, I am impressed with the MyPortal package offering. It really is an attractive offering. The ease of use and low price of the package is surely an offer hard to refuse.

However, being a somewhat experienced webmaster, I find that the system lacks a lot of the required features necessary to succeed in today’s internet marketing arena. As such, I deemed the MyPortal package only suitable for absolute beginners. If you are thinking about competing seriously in the internet, you should get yourself trained to use other web packages. Do note that they will cost a lot more than RM50.

If RM50 is all you can afford to spare right now and a total newbie in terms of the internet, then go for it. Use it to get yourself trained about the internet and web hosting. Hey, where else can you get an RM50 per year hands on training?

Besides, I’m pretty sure, Edorey will do something about all the shortcomings I’ve mentioned above. I will inform them about all these sometime soon. Why?

Simple, I see the potential in their offering. Thus, I have signed up to be a MyPortal dealer. So, as a dealer of MyPortal, it is my responsibility to provide the truth behind what I’m promoting. Yes, the system lacks some features right now. However, at RM50. I believe it is the best way to get the majority of small businesses out there into the internet.

The way I see it. I’m helping these small businesses to grab a piece of the pie from the internet market space. In a market space of multi billions, even if they get only 1% of the traffic, it would certainly be more than enough.

So, would you like to join me as a MyPortal dealer? Here’s a tip.. Dealers get 40% of each MyPortal accounts registered. It’s also a yearly residual income. You get 40% everytime the customer renews yearly. Give me a buzz at +6012 3165551 if you’re interested.

Here’s an existing MyPortal client site if you would like to take a look at a sample.  Check out the Puspanita DBP Portal.

Interested in the RM50 MyPortal Package? Give me a buzz at the number above, or leave your details over at the Build Your Own Web Page Portal Site – MyPortal Step By Step Guide And More.

Go to http://myportal.ultimateguide.my and submit your details in the form provided.