A usual start of the day: Cycle in the pouring rain to work, your computer doesn’t start and the office is out of coffee…. Too stressed to start working right away, so let’s steal a couple of minutes from the boss to check out some personal stuff online. But these minutes easily become 10, 20 minutes, because first you want to see the news, your personal email, watch a YouTube movie to make you feel good and oh, don’t forget to check out the weather, the sun might show up today!

The initial minutes become half an hour, because you have to go to each site separately, load it, sign in, skip the advertorials and commercial messages and do this 4 different times, for all your favorite sites.

Wouldn’t it be great (for your boss as well), if you could have all your most relevant sites combined in one site? No surfing, browsing, URL-typing needed, just one site that brings it all?

A lot of sites do offer some kind of automated personalization, based on predefined criteria like geographical area (IP recognition), the page you came from or click behavior. But till recently, all these sites were about customization of the site by the website-owner (they predefine the criteria), but only since recently you see sites where consumers themselves are in the drivers seat to create their own personalized websites, based on their criteria. This type of rich internet applications are called ‘Rich Portals”.

This is a big mind shift for a lot of companies. This is really about what the customer wants, and not what the company is offering. This trend is also taking place on the web and in my opinion this is definitely part of the Web2.0 trend: the consumer is in charge! Let’s look at a couple of examples.

Frequent visits and brand awareness

In most cases you see personalization used at content-driven websites, like news, sports, media, entertainment. But also in Self Service applications (like a bank) you will see this kind of personalization more and more.

With this kind of personalization, the user can organize the pages themselves, adapt the content and choose their own color scheme. This is all made available by the site-owner, because the more you can personalize your page, the bigger the chance is that the visitor will like the site and the more often the visitor will return.

But in a lot of cases this is easier said then done. How can you make sure you users understand the possibilities and how can you make them start using it? What can we learn from other sites?

iGoogle, Symbaloo, Netvibes and a couple of other initiatives really understood how to make people happy: in one overview you can see news/info/entertainment/mail that you want to see, not what some kind of editorial team wants you to see. And the good news is: this will save you tons of time, so you happy, your boss happy!

Web Personalization (portal) examples:

Most of you will know Netvibes.com

This is a good example, because you can really ‘create’ your own personal page, your start page, based on your interests and needs. You can personalize:

• The lay-out (colors, fonts)
• The content (your news features, your weather page etc.)
• The way the page is organized, by dragging and dropping

Another very nice example is KPN Vandaag. KPN is the largest telecom provider in The Netherlands and they have been really listening to what their customers want. This is a perfect example of marketing 2.0: don’t try to push your message to your customer, but give your customer what they are asking for. KPN realized that they needed to replace their ‘old’ internet start page. But instead of asking an agency to design a new site, they went directly to their customers and asked what their ‘perfect start-page’ would look like.

And this is the result (in Dutch):

KPN Vandaag is the result of listening to customers, interpreting statistics and using the benefits of Rich Internet Applications. The start page can be personalized with your content, your sites and your interests and can even be adjusted to your favorite colors and lay-out. Some other start pages also offer these features and maybe even more, but KPN has been able to present all the options in a very comprehensible way, so all their customers will understand how it works, not only the web-savvy people.

Another interesting Self Service example is ABN Amro internet banking:

ABN Amro customers can adapt the start page of the internet banking section (after log-in). A lot of their customers visit this page very frequently, so it’s a nice offer to service their customers in a personalized way.

You can drag and drop the different content blocks and select the accounts and services you frequently use.

Personalization Technology

The good thing about Web 2.0 is that a lot of good technology is out there that can be used to build those type of personalized websites. There are numerous open-source software initiatives which offer all kinds of widgets and gadgets that can be easily implemented (for free). But companies who look for a stable, re-usable, reliable framework might be better of using commercial frameworks, like Adobe or Backbase. Those type of commercial frameworks offer re-usability of applications, fast development, services and support and most important: the guarantee that you are not using software that might be patented but that you don’t know of.

Conclusion

If you are creating a portal to service your customers, please take the following considerations into account:

• Personalization/use of a portal is only valuable when you have a lot of content to offer for different kind of target groups
• Think about the content up front, because this will be the success factor of your site: will you create it your self, will you buy it, what is the type of content your visitor is looking for. Ask your visitors!
• Customer sites that are visited frequently (like internet banking) have a higher succeed rate then generic news portals, because it will be difficult to differentiate from the existing portals.
• Consider both open-source (free) and commercial frameworks. They both offer distinct advantages. Make sure your choice fits your type of company (liability, security, maintainability, re-usability vs. costs)

For me personally, my mornings in the office start a lot more relaxed and way more efficient, because I will use my personal portal instead of visiting numerous sites. I even have time left for another mug of coffee! (don’t tell my boss )