Shippers Council reinvents Online presence with customer friendly website

By Dapo Olawuni

The Nigerian Shippers Council has said that it is redesigning its online presence through its website in order to enhance interaction between her and the publics.

Deputy Director, Strategy and Corporate Communications, Mr. Rotimi Anifowoshe who stated this recently noted that the agency realised that its website was outdated in features and aesthetics, hence the need for an Assessment Impact Survey (AIS) which revealed the inadequacies.

Anifowose said that the new website; www.shipperscouncil.gov.ng
is an upgrade of the existing one, but with better aesthetics and features such as language translator.

The new website will be launched on Monday 24th of June 2019.

Speaking, Anifowose said “The Nigerian Shippers Council in pursuit of its effectiveness as the nations port economic regulator conducted an assessment impact survey on its present website and socio media interaction, it is needful because you cannot just keep to what you are doing, you must be dynamic and proactive and this was what informed our step.
By the time we did it, identified certain things that needed to be fixed with out present website, we also identified that there is a need for us to intensify our socio media interactions”

“It i s still the same website, but what we have just done is to improve the website, what this means is that the new site would have language translator, which means that you can get served in whatever language you want, French, Spanish among other languages”

According to the Shippers Council deputy director, the Council has international collaborators and would want to relate with them more on the website.

He assured that the three major Nigerian languages would be added to the website as well.

Continuing, he said “We are going to have a chat integration like a life chat, if you send a message to us, in twenty four hours you get a response, the present one doesn’t have it, but the one we are going to bring up has a life chat, you chat with us and you get a response, and we use this to respond to whatever questions people may have”

“We also have the social media integration which would be mobile compatible. Most websites when you reduce them to mobile applications, it gets distorted, but this website would still have its features intact”

“When we conducted the survey, we found out that our present website doesn’t have so much of a better feel and look, this means that it wasn’t that user friendly and this borders on the aesthetics and appearance of the website”

“We also identified that the structure and the layout are not standardised and not enhanced and this Borders on the structure, the links were not also fully integrated, the responsive is very slow and not easily assessable, the last we observed was that the mobile view and use of application were not optimized” he said

Anifowose confirm that the new website was 100% home grown, meaning that the Council didn’t bring in any consultant to design it. He said it was designed solely by staff of the agency.

“By the time we identified what needed to be fixed, we put together a competition amongst our information technology staff”

“They were grouped into six, out of which four designs was worthy of consideration, we asked them to come together again and we fused these qualities into one”