Figure 1: The growth of the registered members of
www.3c3t.com No. Website Name China Website
Ranking World Website
Ranking
1
www.3c3t.com 11,487 112,348
2
www.*test.cn 1,997,188 13,603,128
3
www.ticc.cn 2,520,600 4,934,518
4
www.**i.com 2,639,187 6,606,142
5
www.glsyjcw.com 2,267,608 12,979,035
Table 1: The comparison of
www.3c3t.com with other websites in engineering supervision, testing, and inspection area (query date 06/06/2010. China website rankings were from
http://www.chinarank.org.cn , World website rankings were from
http://www.alexa.com)
CONCLUSION
With the development of the Internet, professionals in different areas have increasing needs for information exchange and social support. Industry or specialized web portals have the opportunity to grow and meet the information exchange and social support needs of the professionals. What are the characteristics of industry web portals? What are the growth stages of industry web portals? Based on the portal life cycle model (Damsgaad, 2002), the new findings of virtual communities research, and our practical experiences as owners/managers of an industry web portal, this paper presents a growth model of industry web portals. The growth model includes preparation stage, attraction stage, contagion stage, entrenchment stage, and defense stage, and the strategies to be taken in each stage.
www.3c3t.com is an industry web portal in China’s engineering supervision, testing, and inspection industry. This paper discussed the web portal in details as a case study. This research, although in the preliminary status, will contribute to the practice of web portal business through the set of guidelines for practitioners to launch and run industry web portals.
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