The present invention is directed to a method and system for designing a web portal or enterprise portal comprising a hierarchical structure of portal pages and portlets for accessing web content or enterprise content accessible via the portal. A method for modifying a given hierarchical navigation topology including nodes and edges connected between the nodes in a web application environment, in which topology a web page corresponds to a predetermined topology level and displays one or more applets, includes: providing a user interface for defining a user-specific topology, the defining including promoting a node within the topology to a higher level; demoting a node within the topology to a lower level; and moving a node within a page level; storing information for recovering a user-modified topology in a database; and displaying the user-modified topology to the user in response to the user specifying a predetermined node.