Customizing a Portal

Assignment Objectives:

	familiarize the student with the customization of content delivery available through portals
	show the variety of additional features that portals provide and practice customizing them
	demonstrate the difference is the features of different portal

Procedure:

Visit a Portal Yahoo

and signup for a personalized page

Go to Yahoo.com and click My Yahoo or go to http://my.yahoo.com

Customize the page by clicking on each of the following 3

Change Layout

Change Colors

Change the content (topic(s) using .

Add Content on the bottom of the screen
Be sure to select most of the following (choose lots, it is easy to delete what you don't want)

	TV
	Movie Show times
	Weather
	Lead Photo, Comics, Best Fares
	email, Search
	Sports (if interested)
	Lottery (if interested)
	Horoscopes (if interested)
	Stock Portfolio (if interested)
	Other interesting stuff (you can always delete it or move to bottom of the page)

Customize the entries under all of the following topics:

	select your favorite 3 comics
	select the sports teams that you are most interested in, remove the others
	after you have selected the type of news, select the sources, change the number of headlines
	select the channels reported for TV if you get cable
	create a stock portfolio (IBM, DELL, YHOO or look up symbols for a stock)
	change the cities for which you get weather, remove choices that are only several miles apart, get a foreign city
	add a movie theater that is not listed for your area but shows a movie you might like to see once in a while

Change the layout, so the stuff that you are most interested in "above the fold", on the first screen, like Yahoo's Lead Photo

Optionally, change the colors or Optionally, Build a secondary page

Print the 1st 4 pages

For TRIPLE credit do both Yahoo and Excite (or MSN, or Lycos) and compare them.
Make a chart. In each box describe WHY the feature is handled better or worse than the competition. Be specific! (see TV example)
Can you customize one better than other in some areas? What does Yahoo provide in Movies that Excites does not? What does Excite provide in TV that Yahoo does not. What do they do equally well? So, which do you like better?
Complete most of the following. Provide categories of your own.

	Both	Yahoo	Excite
News
Sports
TV	Shows station for cable and
Movies
Horoscope
Stocks
Comics
Games
Lottery, Travel, Email, Search etc
Layout flexibility
Portion of screen you cannot control
Opinion		Briefcase and Financial information are critical for me

Print your personalized Yahoo and/or Excite Page(s) and your secondary page ...
Make sure when you print the page it has proper heading (&w&b Page &p of &P)
and footer (&u&b&d&t your-name)

Extra credit. Why is getting your information from the internet from a personalized page different from traditional (newspapers, radio, television, magazines)? What are the implications of most people get there information this way. Write a thoughtful paper of 10 or so sentences.