Sophisticated Net users likely to switch on to specialist sites

As more and more of us become familiar with the Internet, operators of so-called portal sites - those that aim to be the first gateway we see when logging on to the Web - may find it increasingly hard to hold our interest.

Portals such as Excite (www.excite.co.uk) and Lycos (www.lycos.co.uk) began life as search tools, but have now gone beyond that to offer a wide menu of content and links, trying to cater for as many potential interest groups as possible.

However, as users become more sophisticated in the way they surf - in particular, by getting to know what they want the Web to do for them and exactly where they want to go - the usefulness of this wide-ranging approach looks like diminishing fast. Users will simply find the sites they like and use the most and bookmark them, making portals obsolete.

The facts seem to bear out this theory. According to data from Nielsen/NetRatings, visits to the most popular portals have levelled off in recent weeks despite continued growth in overall Internet use.

With the possible exception of sex, sites devoted to money score highest on many users' lists of priorities. So, it is hardly surprising that specialist sites devoted to investing are beginning to appear. Rather than portals, it is fairer to call these sites jumping-off points.

You might not need to use them every day, or to set them up as your default home page when you launch your Web browser. But if, say, you need to find a banking website quickly or the Web address of an obscure derivatives exchange, a jumping-off point will help you locate it.

At their simplest, sites such as this are simply organised connections of links. But, rather like the portals themselves, they have tended to offer a greater variety of content as their usage has grown, sometimes obscuring their original mission.

Typical additions to content include a built-in quote server (type in a ticker symbol and get the up-to-date share price), or sometimes a bulletin. Which financial jumping-off points are worth a visit? It depends on the type of investment activity in which you are interested. But one drawback is that many of the more established points are aimed mainly at US investors.

A good example of a US-based site is Invest-O-Rama (www.investorama.com), which has a huge choice of topics related to investment and finance and claims to have nearly 12,000 separate links, divided into almost 150 categories.

Europe is catching up, though, and another large site is Qualisteam (www.qualisteam.com). This oddly named site is French in origin - which might explain why British sites are relegated to "other Europe", while the greatest prominence is given to France and Germany.

Qualisteam's speciality is bank websites and those of stock and derivatives exchanges around the world and it claims to have indexed and linked nearly 3,000 of the former, plus more than 100 of the latter.

British jumping-off points have tended to emerge without much publicity and often consist just of collections of links. They are, arguably, none the worse for that. However, some with more sophisticated content are now emerging. One is UK Invest (www.ukinvest.co.uk), which has been designated the main finance channel for Freeserve users. But it has more of an online magazine feel to it than that of a true jumping-off point.

Those interested in futures and options can log into Numa (www.numa.com) which has a huge section of derivatives-related links and also includes an online bookshop - run by Global Investor - specialising in those books related to the technicalities and trading of futures and options.

A site that is less overtly commercial is BUBL (www.bubl.ac.uk/link). This was set up mainly by and for use by academics, but it contains a number of useful financial links and is laid out in a simple, text-based format without the flim-flam that festoons some of the commercial operations.

Another good product from the academic community, containing a wide range of useful links for investors and business generally, is the University of Strathclyde's site devoted to business information on the Internet (www.dis.strath. ac.uk/business).

Yet another business site worth a visit is 1-stop Investment (www.1stopinvestment. freeserve.co.uk), an easy-to-use and comprehensive set of links split into different categories such as banks, books, companies, charts, software, prices, brokers and so on.

UKOnlineInvesting (www.ukonlineinvesting.com) is a new site that has negotiated provision of content through links to third-party providers. These include Wright Investor Services' snapshot profiles on UK-listed companies; and Multex, which allows access to research reports from brokers.

One thing to which most Net users and Website operators have to resign themselves, however, is the pace of change. As the Internet evolves and users become more demanding, only the sites that adapt to meet these new expectations will survive and thrive.