(FORTUNE Small Business) – Funny thing about a gold rush: Sometimes there's just no gold. A year ago, a group of fledgling Websites went prospecting, and it seemed like easy treasure. By providing content and services for growing businesses in one place, these sites, known as small business portals, wanted to become every entrepreneur's go-to destination on the Web. Win those eyeballs--and wallets--and be the small biz Yahoo.

But gold mines are tricky. Set off your charges without enough planning, and you blow yourself up.

When we looked at portals last year, we thought they were great--in theory. Execution was another story. For one thing, the sites aggregated services--click here to process your payroll, click here to build a Website--without any sort of inte gration. You'd deal with different vendors, different different interfaces, different support lines. Not exactly seamless. Worse, to attract the broadest possible audience, many services catered to the lowest common denominator, so the press releases and Websites they'd crank out might be a bit too cookie-cutter for your needs.

Still, we thought these sites were onto something. By providing quick, relatively inexpensive access to on- and offline services, portals could help businesses grow. They just needed to work on their delivery. Wait till next year, we said.

So we waited. And we watched as the only thing to have a worse 2000 than portals was the punch-card ballot. DigitalWork and SmartAge (now B2SB Technologies) shelved IPO plans. Onvia, which did go public, had shares selling at less than $1 at press time, down from a high of $78. NBCi merged its AllBusiness.com site with Bigvine.com, an online barter marketplace, taking a minority stake in the new venture. DigitalWork, Inc .com, Onvia, and SmartAge announced major layoffs, and while they're still around in some form or another, all have ceased to position themselves as destination sites. Others have slipped into irrelevance.

That mine is still untapped--and has fewer treasure seekers. A review of the sites a year later shows that some are still standing too close to the dynamite, and none have proven themselves to be indispensable to the small business owner. So much for that easy treasure.

The future of portals depends on better integration of services and better distribution. The analyst group Cahners In-Stat predicts a robust market for portals--or online business centers, as it calls them--with revenues of $1 billion by 2003 if portals reach out to banks and other established companies. No longer going it alone would potentially address both issues. A bank, for example, could offer instant e-commerce, integrating a Web hosting service with its own merchant accounts. It might also solve portals' problem of finding users. "A bank already has small business customers, and its customers trust it," says Kneko Burney, Director of eBusiness Infrastructure and Services at Cahners. A portal, on the other hand, is just some site, she says. "Businesses came, but they'd say, I don't know you, and you have a dot-com in your name."

Once again, it sounds great--in theory. But don't get too excited that your bank will call you with a portal offer just yet. While many portal players are talking up such plans and partnerships, "we're not seeing a lot of it right now," Burney says.

Some of the sites we revisited seem to have gotten worse. Citibank's Bizzed.com might as well as have been cryogenically frozen for the last year. Not only had it done little to improve its service, but Bizzed's primary value is also still only in offers such as a hundred bucks off an IBM ThinkPad laptop, just as it was in early 2000. And judging from the activity on Bizzed's message boards--zero posts on boards titled "your staff" and "marketing"; one post on "office decor"--we aren't the only ones less than buzzed about Bizzed.

AllBusiness.com was one of our favorites a year ago, but it has regressed by dropping a service exchange it had added for businesses to find someone quickly who could fix a computer or answer a legal question. Last year business owners told us that's what they really wanted, and we've been encouraged to see its emergence at Office.com and Netscape's Netbusiness.com, one of our AOL Time Warner siblings. AllBusiness' replacement, Bigvine.com's barter exchange, looks like a big disappointment. Most of the service providers listed had yet to make a "sale" and hence had no feedback, and we wonder how effective it is to hire a lawyer or an accountant this way.

Is anyone headed in the right direction? The most promising developments come from Microsoft's bCentral, which is starting to tie all of the pieces together. For example, its Commerce Manager lets you enter products you want to sell into an online catalog and then choose different marketplaces and auctions at which you wish to sell them. The listings are automatically generated without your having to reenter data. Sales are tracked, and inventory and contact managers updated, all from one interface. Right now the service only works with a limited number of sales channels, such as MSN Auctions and the Fairmarket Auction Network, which gets you listed on sites like Lycos and ZDNet, but not eBay.

Microsoft has the lead as of this writing, but we're also keeping an eye on B2SB Technologies, the former SmartAge, which is readying its eBusiness Builder for April. Using this service, you'll be able to use a single interface to create an online store, build a catalog, and generate instant listings on eBay and at Amazon zShops in addition to on your own site. If eBusiness Builder works as promised, it could be a useful tool for small and medium-size retailers.

Both Microsoft and B2SB plan to distribute these services through partners. This should attract more users, but, more important, it develops licensing fees as a revenue stream, perhaps keeping these services afloat a bit longer. BCentral, ironically, will even be available at other portals such as Office.com, which will offer bCentral's services wrapped in Office.com colors. B2SB is abandoning its destination site as of March 31 and will distribute eBusiness Builder only through partners like ZDNet, which will offer the service to its own customers. No bank deals yet, but it's a start.

These developments leave us a bit more optimistic. Integrated, seamless services, like the ones starting to roll out, may finally give small business owners a reason to embrace a portal, provided, of course, that the bundled services keep coming and the support is easy and efficient. Will that portal be a survivor from the current pack, or an all-new site brought to you by the local bank? We hate to say it, but wait till next year.