Port of Antwerp-Bruges

Port of Antwerp-Bruges is the second largest port in Europe, with more than 300 liner services to more than 800 destinations, thereby ensuring worldwide connectivity. It is an important lifeline for the Belgian economy. Port of Antwerp-Bruges is also a leader in sustainable development, with a strong commitment to the circular economy and a goal of becoming carbon neutral by 2050. With over a thousand employees, the Port Authority fulfills four important roles, being the landlord, operator, regulator for the ports of Antwerp and Bruges, as well as the community builder for all stakeholders.

Adhering to the highest standards of security and IT operations, we created a composable architecture allowing to update all existing legacy platforms. This approach involves using a collection of carefully selected tools and technologies that form one connected platform through a series of APIs. For example, the platform has live integrations with a translations provider, a SAAS Search Solution, a CRM system, a mailing system, a job vacancies system, and a newly created nautical message tool.

The new platform allows for the development of an ecosystem of digital services, with proper lifecycle management of applications in mind. At the same time it reduces risks and dependencies, while providing a faster time to market for digital marketing communication iniatives. As a result, by being able to add, extract or change tools and technologies as needed without impacting other components of the architecture, Port of Antwerp-Bruges can quickly adapt to future changes if needed. 

Through a series of workshops with stakeholders in- and outside of the organization, it was clear to us that given the huge and diverse volume of content and audiences, a traditional navigation structure with lots of menu’s would result in website visitors getting lost and frustrated. That is why we opted for Algolia as a SAAS search engine with categorized search results as the focal point of the corporate website. This allows visitors to quickly and easily find the content or contact information they need, without having to navigate through multiple menus.

At the same time, it provides the marketing department with insights on how the website is used, what content is lacking, and to provide synonyms for common searches, further improving the user experience. 

To manage content Drupal CMS is used. To ensure that only approved content can be published on the websites, we configured a content validation process in Drupal allowing various teams and departments to manage their content on the website in a decentralized, but controlled and coordinated manner. Also, to ensure that no outdated content is present on the website, we set-up notifications in the CMS to alert teams when a page has not been updated for a long time. Given the volume of content on the website, this proved to be of real added value for the Port Authority.