1.Your identity as a brand in mkt.

Well in the era of internet when people are buying everything through .com(internet), it is really important to identify yourself in the deep sea of uncountable web pages.If i click to bbc.com i know i need a news on  my desktop or for the same reaason if i click youtube.com i know i need to see/watch/view some famous videos.It takes time to build a brand and it takes more to retain in  market when you get a rival.So your identity  is needed on web front  as well.

2.Who is the audience of your site.

Obviously if you are a news channel your not going to put story about unniversity syllabus or videogallery with famous celebrity sex scandles.So you have to put relevent content on the portal to serve the taget audiance.I  mean i will visit IKEA portal to see latest furniture design i cannot see my bycicle or bikes models over there.So  i need to serve content to my audience.

3.Anything that is revenue generating should holld maximum value.need to check about signup/newsletter subscription and fourm disussion.

4.what do you want your visitors to do on your site when he visits your page and driving him/making him do/take actions which results you in profit and satisfying your goal for the portal.

5.try to make things presented on KISS philoshphy present information on basis of your priority and one at a time too many information wil drive the visitors NUTS and he will get confused besides chances are he  will simply quit away from your portal so you need to keep him/her guessing.

6.brand identity on portal:-- you need to clearly decide about placing the companies logo and color surrounding it in order to make brand idntity as the portal is going to give look and feel of your company for your probable clients.

7.graphics and flash:-- now this is tricky.you have to decide that your brand really needs lots of image/flash/audio/video in iit? now if your a export house obvipusly  you need to put pics of  your product and say you a company sending concert cd`s it needs to haave promotional videos  in   it.wwe have to make sure thhat it`s not of access and also that a viewer has control over the media he can  click/pause/stop/mute it.
   NOTE :-- you also have to see the performance constrains which means the page loading time is not getting affected besides your media supports codecs that is playable on all the browsers.

8.Layout :- now this is most important aspect of your portal.few functions/constraints that needs to be considered is ->     
         1.placement of logo.
         2.proper positioning of navigation.
         3.the nagigation should not be over crowded and should be clean/easy in finding/use with the prospective of a    visitor.
         4.proper pagination must be takencare of and there should be least/no horizontal or vartical scrollbars.
          5.the look and feel of each page inside navigation should be uniformed not confusing.
          6.posittioning for google adwords and other should  be properly taken care of and placed  with keeping in    mind that it  is not distracting users eye.

SCO consideration :--now as you know it`s text that is liked most by the crawlers so we need to make sure that every page has some text information which in turn is/can be usable.

Deciding about a CMS :-- now this is most important consideration one needs to think of.is the portal going to have dynamic data rather that one time data upload/submitted?now there is glitches when is comes to SEO if you are using a CMS.so careful decision should be taken care of apart from the fact that the backend content uploader/writer are non-techies.

providing a form element:--- now the other important phenomenon is the reason of information gathering and is wer we need the form element.so we need to make sure about the amount of content we need to place and how friendly the submission mode will be for the visitor.

organization/taxonomy architecture;-- now another piece of advice please put relevent/subject/items/ and make sure to stick with it when your making a navigation or putting the associated tags associated with the contents.that will make your site easy 4 the visitor besides it will also be search portal friendly.

Brand Marketing:- well this is the most important part after the redesign has been achived.twitter facebook youtube digg are some sites which is know for crowd pulling so it is always good to have your presence made in all those public platform.