Making the internet easier

This Web Portal is designed for convenience, reliability, and usability, while still maintaining a modern and appealing aesthetic.

The Information Highway

The Internet is a very convenient way to get information. There is a lot you can do with this resource, such as:

  • Listen to music
  • Watch videos
  • Communicate with friends
  • Solve problems
  • Learn something new
  • And much more...

However, this information highway doesn't really have much direction as to the route one must take to use it to it's full potential. It can, in fact, get confusing quite quickly. However, there is a solution.

The Web Portal

The web portal is a site designed to showcase important sites that will be useful to people, usually set to be the first open site on a computer's web browser. This makes it easier to traverse the internet, as important sites are presented in an easy-to use and understandable format, and less confusion is presented.

It is basically the same thing as the new tab page or default homepage of your web browser, except the companies like Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla design theirs to fit their goals as a corporation, rather than for the end user. A web portal really should be designed to fit the user's needs, and help them through their journey.

The Difference

The Other Guys

  • Comes up with sites it thinks you want to use
  • Useless categories that don't sort in a convenient way
  • Datamines you ridiculously to fulfill it's obscure dastardly schemes
  • Bland aesthetics and boring monotonous UI
  • Managed by a faceless corporate giant who has no concept of the user
  • Literally no clocks whatsoever

This Web Portal

  • You define the sites you want to see
  • Categories that are useful and make sense
  • We don't track you or steal your data
  • Attention to detail and aesthetics, featuring a dynamic, beautiful-looking UI
  • Managed by a passionate developer who understands the user and is open to feedback and suggestions
  • Clocks on every page!

As you can see, the best option is clear: This web portal is designed for you!

Intuitive Design

The web portal is designed with a categorical structure to ensure you can find what you need without having to sift through tons of links, but rather, only needing to take a look at one page.

We also use icon-based navigation for the major categories to ensure easy recognition of what you're looking for.

News Music Share Clock Menu Bookmark Gaming

Quick Access Links

Some icons on the sidebar and homepage lead to webpages, rather than categories. This is because I'm too lazy to actually make pages for those categories and learn APIs those pages are intended to be easy to access, and it would be inconvenient in most use cases to force those into a category.

The Clock

We have a clock on every page of the portal! Through the magic of JavaScript, it is a fully functioning clock that updates in real time and reads in your current time zone!

It is on the bottom left of the home page, and found by hovering on the clock on the lower section of the sidebar on any other pages. Also, the widget is right below this paragraph so that you can try it out.

Time

--:--:--

DISCLAIMER: Due to me not understanding JavaScript and HTML working together, this clock may not be accurate. Please don't trust this one; if you need an accurate measurement of time, use the one on the sidebar.

Technical Details

This section goes over some of the more technical details of this project. However, you might not care, so you could just skip over it.

The Amazing Flexbox

The Flexbox is an interesting CSS tool that makes HTML elements display differently. They are responsive, which makes them useful for a multitude of situations, especially the icon grid on the homepage or in making pages more responsive.

They also solve the age-old problem of trying to center elements perfectly, and the methodology for that is actually quite simple; they also make it easier to adjust a webpage's contents without having to change too much formatting.

More details can be found at the W3Schools documentation on flexboxes.

Responsive Web Design

To put it simply, responsive web design is a sort of philosophy for web designers to construct their sites in a way that makes it fit any device a user might be using, such as computers with varying screen size, tablets, phones, smart fridges (hey, I don't judge), etc., without things being the wrong size in those places.

To meet the challenges of setting up for RWD, there are a few things we do. For example:

  • We use flexboxes for positioning to allow items to be reorganized if it doesn't fit the right way
  • Instead of using pixels as our unit of measurement, we use relative units (such as em, vw/vh, and percentage) because they scale better across devices (More info)

My previous portal design was not very mobile-friendly, but with this redesign and my improved knowledge of formatting, this can be a viable option across all devices.

Future Plans

I have hopes to improve this later on, but in initial development I did not have access to a web server which limited some of the features I could actively develop.
I have some plans for going forward, but it will take time to develop new features and I may need to learn other languages, APIs, or tools to make those happen.

Short-term goals

I intend to implement PHP once this gets uploaded to the webserver for better configuration and personalization. This will allow me to customize links and categories and will generally make development run more smoothly.

Mid-term goals

I will be working on the categories to make sure they are the most useful to everyone, and I will allow better customization of those on a by-user basis. I also want to create a user-login system to allow individual users to customize the portal to fit their needs.

Long-term goals

Through the use of external APIs, I want to make the new tab page sort of a "dashboard" to give people an overview of the time, date, weather, and maybe other things. I also intend to make the other categories customizable on a by-user basis, and allow users to select their own personal themes for the interface (e.g. custom backgrounds, new color themes, dark mode)
This is more of an optional task, but I hope it can make it's way into the final product.

Conclusion

Thank you for considering this web portal. It means a lot to me that you are using it.

It is highly recommended that you set your homepage to this page and that you ensure that the new tab page is also set that way.

Feel free to give feedback, as this will help us improve the site and shape the future of the web portal.

Done here? Return to the homepage or go back to the top.