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AOL.com Joins Crowded Portal Club

Twelve new content channels and a reorganized home page put AOL in portal position.

By Lisa Moskowitz, PCWorld   

The new content is categorized into 12 channels called Web Centers. Each Web Center contains several topics and is populated with news from various online sources. For example, under the Entertainment Web Center, Music Boulevard provides music news while Rocktropolis provides rock reviews. The Sports Web Center is powered by Real Fans content, while the Health Web Center features content from Electra.

For the most part, each Web Center is set up the same way. A Best Bets section directs users to other relevant sites; Great Deals features AOL's e-commerce partners; Time Savers highlights an online tool specific to the topic; and Shortcuts provides a search engine for content-specific information. Two Web Centers retain the design of their content providers: Personal Finance is an AOL cobranded Quicken.com home page and the Local Web Center links you to a similarly cobranded Digital City page.

The News Web Center is integrated with AOL.com's new My News service, which lets you customize a news page with the types of information you want to view. Topics include U.S. elections, international and national news, science, entertainment, stock quotes, business, technology, and sports. When you visit the News Web Center and click a specific topic such as Sports you'll go to your personalized My News page and be able to view the content you've chosen. My News Content is provided by the Associated Press, Reuters, SportsTicker, Weather Services, and Quicken.com.

Also featured on AOL.com's homepage is NetFind, where AOL's search engine and white and yellow page directories are available. Each week, NetFind posts the top ten most popular searches. You'll also find a Web Utilities section, which includes AOL NetMail, a Web-based e-mail service for AOL members, and AOL Instant Messenger. A Shopping section rounds out the home page. In the next few months, a personal Web page publishing service called Hometown AOL is scheduled to debut on the site.