Most portal server products provide a web based user interface or an administrative console in which the administrator of the portal will select the layout and the look and feel of the portal. However, we feel that the role of designing the look and feel of the portal should typically be done by professional web designers. The Web Designers are well versed with and use professional web design tools such as Adobe Dreamweaver or Microsoft Frontpage to design web pages.

The DesignView project will aim to solve some if not all of these issues, by providing plugins for the most popular web design tools such as Macromedia Dreamweaver and Microsoft Frontpage. On installing these plugins into the appropriate web design tools, the web designers will have tools at their disposal by which they will be able to create professional layouts and themes for their portal server. At the moment we will be providing these plugins, which will work in conjunction with the Portal Server available from the OpenPortal Java.Net project.