The Port of London Authority

The Brief
The Port of London Authority is celebrating next year (2009) its Centenary and MSO.net is currently working on a new and exciting section in recognition of this.

In recent months, the Port of London Authority has concentrated on bringing its website completely up to date – competing with the likes of the BBC in terms of visual impact and user experience.

The Development Phases
As a first phase, MSO.net was asked to focus on improving the functionality of the intranet initially and once that had been released into the live environment, phase two would involve rolling out the public site.

The new site is now flexible and visually very impressive.  Using a series of widgets (designed and coded by MSO.net), the home page is sub-divided into the different areas of interest as well as the displaying of drop-down menus in the main navigation.

Some of the widgets themselves have been coded so that their width can be changed i.e. spanning one or two columns.  Using a system of ‘drag and drop’, the website’s administrator can reposition the widgets at whim (layout limitations considered).  The benefits of this home page update is obvious: the PLA can keep the site fresh and current; it can move widgets depending upon their particular relevance to a particular day.  The news widget is a completely dynamic function.  Once the minimum quota of news items have been added, the widget will display each news category with a + or – button beside it whereupon the user can see more news within each category.

The Solution
The website’s administrator has complete control over the home page’s layout without having to request button visual change requests or coding amendments.  The administrator can do the following:

	See a clear example of the current home page
	Move each widget around the screen to test their suitability
	Change the widget’s width (where possible)
	Test the ‘view layout’ prior to it being activated and released to go live
	Amend any image or text

Result
As the website has evolved so there has been an increase in the amount of Internet traffic.  As an accessible, comprehensive and central resource of information, public enquiries can now be referred to the site.