portals VS sites

This is a picture of a flushing toilet. A vortex of water swirls in the middle. Whenever I see the word portal, I get this mental image...

Here’s an interesting thing that a colleague and I were discussing at work today. I’m not sure that it’s a ‘mistake’ really, since so far the evidence points out the writers of our source texts as being the culprits. However, today’s debate was the culmination of several years’ worth of seeing this issue occur, so I’m saying the jury’s still out until further evidence is acquired. ;)

Here’s the thing: It seems to me that portal is being used far too often instead of the technically accurate website.

Over the years, I’ve proofread many sentences that went something like, ‘The event is also being supported by the amazing and brilliant web portal www.badarticle.com,’ or ‘More information can be found at our portal,’ or even ‘The plebiscite was open to readers of the welovemusic.pl web portal.’

Now then, Wikipedia tells us that “A web portal, also known as a links page, presents information from diverse sources in a unified way.” It then goes on to say that “Examples of public web portals are AOL, Excite, iGoogle, MSN, Netvibes, and Yahoo!.” I guess we could add our beloved wp.pl and onet.pl to that list.

The key here is “links page”. Each link takes you away to another website, or to another interesting thing at that portal, such as news, feature articles, weather reports, a search engine, email, pictures of exotic-looking women wearing coconut brassieres etc. To go a step further, websites consist of webpages, and there are also things called vortals, which sound like a cosmic threat to me.

Looking at one or two source texts on the spur of the moment today, my friend showed me that the Polish for portal is, in fact, portal. At least it is in our documents. And since the few examples we looked at today were written by civil servants at the Urząd Miastów of various cities, I have to assume they’re mis-using the word on purpose, because somehow web portal sounds more exciting and grand than web site.

Which, you know, I can understand that in marketing and promo texts we need to hype things a bit, but it’s not like we’re saying that something that is just ‘good’ is now ‘amazing’, rather we’re using an entirely different word altogether. So fine, but then some of these cheeky morons will turn around and give you seven kinds of hell because you used correct English in their texts and not the ‘established versions’ of things which are both zepsuty and bałagan!

Right then, let’s summarise: A website is not a web portal. Civil servants are annoying in any language. It’s now time for a wee drink! Hurrah! See you soon friends, and don’t forget to comment below on this or any other post if you have a different idea or would like something explaining a little more clearly. :)