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论文全文如下：
The Growth of Industry Web Portals: A Case Study

Duanning Zhou
Eastern Washington University
Spokane, WA, USA
dzhou@ewu.edu

Aiwen Zhang
Shaanxi Transport Foreign Fund Financed Project Construction Limited Company
Xi’an, Shaanxi, China
670802927@qq.com

Ning Lu
Foshan Highway&Bridge Construction Co., LTD
Foshan, Guangdong, China
cntco@163.com



ABSTRACT:
With the development of the Internet, professionals in different industries or specialized areas have an increasing need for information exchange and social support. Therefore, industry or specialized web portals present a new opportunity in the Internet business. This paper presents a growth model for industry web portals. The model contains five stages: preparation stage, attraction stage, contagion stage, entrenchment stage, and defense stage, and the actions and strategies to be taken and used in each stage. An industry web portal for engineering supervision, testing, and inspection professionals in China is analyzed. This paper contributes to the industry web portals practice by a set of guidelines that can be applied by practitioners in the industry web portals business.


Keywords:
Industry web portal, web portal management, virtual community, online community


INTRODUCTION
Over the years of the development of the Internet, the existing large general-purpose web portals, like Yahoo, MSN, AOL, etc., have monopolized the market. It is extremely difficult for new entrants to enter the general web portals business. On the other hand, from the evidence of the emergence of professional virtual communities (Chen and Hung, 2010), professionals in different industries or specialized areas are eager to have virtual platforms for information exchange and social support. Therefore, industry or specialized web portals present a new opportunity in the Internet business. For convenience, we use the term industry web portals to refer to industry web portals, specialized web portals, and professional-specific web portals.

The main differences between general web portals and industry web portals are the content and users. An industry web portal’s content is about the specific industry, which may include news, knowledge, recruitment information, and various virtual communities. The users of an industry web portal are people working in the industry, people working in a related industry, and people seeking job opportunities in the industry. Visitors come to an industry web portal for diverse purposes which may include looking for news and jobs, learning new knowledge, seeking friendship and support, sharing knowledge, experiences, opinions, and ideas, and looking for co-creation of new knowledge, new products, and new services.

How does an industry web portal grow and evolve? What approaches and strategies should an industry web portal use to succeed? Little research addresses these issues that are especially important to practitioners. This paper aims to narrow the gap through a proposed industry web portal growth model and a detailed case discussion.


LITERATURE REVIEW
Damsgaad (2002) presents a portal life cycle model for web portal management. The life cycle model contains four phases: attraction phase, contagion phase, entrenchment phase, and defense phase, in which each phase needs to overcome certain challenges to proceed to the next phase. Attraction phase of a web portal starts from the launch of the web portal with some unique/innovative features which the existing web portals do not provide. The main tasks of the attraction stage are to attract visitors and to keep visitors coming back to the portal to become recurring users. Contagion phase’s focus is to “infect” the recurring users so that they can help spread the portal. Entrenchment phase comes when the number of users of the portal reaches a “critical mass”. The web portal at this phase can “tax” users by providing upgraded/enhanced services and accepting advertisements. Once the portal is well established, it needs to defend this status by carefully monitoring the challenges from new entrants. The primary goal of these four phases is to "lock-in" users, so that they cannot easily switch to the competitors (Damsgaad, 2002).

A relevant research area of industry web portals is virtual (online) communities which have been widely discussed in Information Systems discipline (Johnson, Butler, Faraj, Jarvenpaa, Kane and Kudaravalli 2010). While the majority research of virtual communities focuses on the determinants of participation and knowledge sharing (Casalo, Flavian and Guinaliu, 2010; Sun, Fang and Lim, 2010; Wasko and Faraj, 2005; Zhang, Fang, Wei and Chen, 2010), others study virtual communities from the viewpoint of the success factors and management (Leimeister, Sidiras and Krcmar, 2006; Rosenkranz and Feddersen, 2008). The common success factors include: high stability of the website, offering up-to-date contents, offering high-quality contents, encouraging interaction between users, building trust among users, handling user data sensitively, short reaction time of the website, and evolution of the website according to the ideas of its users (Koh, Kim, Butler and Bock, 2007; Liu, Du and Tsai, 2009; Leimeister et al., 2006; Rosenkranz and Feddersen, 2008).

Preparation Stage (Before 2006)
Before 2005, there were some general industry web portals in China. However, these web portals were all-purpose oriented, and tried to include information from all industries. It is hard for professionals in a specific industry to have an “at home” feeling and experience when using those general industry web portals. Two professionals in the engineering supervision and inspection industry found the gap, and then a business opportunity. Because the number of China’s infrastructure construction projects increases quickly, the demand of supervision and inspection engineers also increases rapidly. A web portal for the professionals in this area has the potential to succeed. The two professionals also decided to act as the managers of the web portal because they believed that only professionals in this industry can truly understand the needs, insights, and changes in the industry.

Web 2.0 platforms enable communication, cooperation, and collaboration of individuals and groups over the Internet. The two professionals chose forum based applications to start the web portal. Since the two professionals had no website development background, they were looking for software modules with the required features and at a low-cost. At the beginning, they adapted the Dvbbs -- a free forum software package. Later, they hired programmers to customize the system.

Due to the lack of knowledge of search engine optimization, at the beginning, the web portal had no effective keywords. Later in the attraction stage, the web portal re-designed the effective keywords, such as engineering supervision, engineering supervision consulting, engineering testing, engineering inspection, construction supervision, and construction inspection. The outcome shows that these well-designed keywords play an effective role in having the website listed in the front of the search results of search engines.

Attraction Stage (January 2006 – July 2008)
www.3c3t.com was launched in January 2006. A unique part of the portal is that it provides learning materials for the industry. There were several forums: consulting supervision, testing and inspection, and construction supervision. In the beginning, the web master uploaded news and learning materials, and encouraged visitors and members to share and exchange. As member-generated learning materials increased, visitors found that this portal was very useful, and more visitors started coming to the portal and registering as members.

The key features to attract visitors to the portal are the industry news, the learning materials, and the forums. In July 2008, the number of the registered members had reached 53,298.

Contagion Stage (August 2008 – December 2009)
As the content of the web portal became richer, visitors and members found this portal more useful. Through word of mouth, these visitors and members recommended the portal to their colleagues, classmates, and friends. Some visitors and members used QQ (the most popular instant messaging website in China) to “infect” others to come to www.3c3t.com. www.3c3t.com also used QQ to promote the web portal. However, the dilemma is that although at the beginning, the QQ promotion recruited a certain amount of visitors and members, later on, some visitors and members only used QQ to communicate and share; so they didn’t come to www.3c3t.com, which caused an opposite outcome. This is an interesting phenomenon which is worthy of further research.

The main objective of this stage is to gain popularity and reach “critical mass” of visitors and members. Different online communities have different measures of “critical mass” of visitors and members (Raban et al., 2010). Through the analysis of the engineering supervision, testing and inspection industry in China, we believe that 100,000 members can be considered as “critical mass” for this industry web portal.
        
As the web portal built more and more virtual communities with different topics, more visitors and members can have specific platforms that they need. Also, the web portal started to provide the information and materials of certificate exams for the industry, as well as recruitment information and services. These new features and services played an important role in promoting the site’s popularity. At the end of 2009, the number of the registered members of the web portal had reached 109,103.

Entrenchment Stage (January 2010 - present)
The number of registered members and the site traffic kept increasing. At the end of 2010, the number of the registered members of www.3c3t.com had reached 136,629 (see Figure 1), of which there were 417 institutional and about 100 individual VIP members who pay membership fees. www.3c3t.com is ranked No. 1 in the engineering supervision, testing, and inspection industry in search engines Google and Baidu (a leading search engine in China), and is well ahead of other web portals in this area in China (see Table 1). The web portal began to offer fee-based services, and accept advertisements. The web portal generated a positive cash flow in 2010.

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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