Global Maritime Forum launches new website

Global Maritime Forum has launched a new low-carbon website. The site aims to make its diverse portfolio of programmes and initiatives clear and accessible, make finding reports and articles easy, and facilitate straightforward connections with the right people.

COPENHAGEN, 19 JUNE 2024 – The Global Maritime Forum, a non-profit organisation committed to shaping the future of global seaborne trade, launched a new website today that better reflects its sustainability focus and makes its research into the shipping industry easier to access.

“The new website is designed to be both very user friendly and low carbon, not because our small site will save the planet, but to act as a showcase and inspiration for others,”

Rasmus Nord Jørgensen, Director of Communications, Global Maritime Forum

Making a website ‘low carbon’ involves both technical and design choices. A major contributor is hosting the website with a vendor that gets its power from renewable energy. The visual design of the site is also a considerable factor, with design decisions aimed at reducing the amount of data that needs to be transferred between the server and the users. This means, as an example, using fewer photos and videos and not having videos start automatically.

“Our new website relies more on graphics and animation than photos and video to reduce its carbon footprint. We toyed with the idea of using illustrations of our people, but decided to use real photos to make sure that they can be recognised out in the world,” Jørgensen said.

The original website was built in 2018 for an organisation whose primary project was its Annual Summit, which gathers C-suite leaders from across the maritime value chain. As the Global Maritime Forum grew and evolved to include a number of year-round initiatives and research projects, it became difficult for users to find the reports and articles they needed, according to user interviews conducted by the Global Maritime Forum and Copenhagen-based digital agency 1508. This user challenge has been fixed with the new website’s easy-to-access library function.

Visually, the website tries to bridge the gap between the original logo and the visual identities of various programmes, like the industry-renowned Getting to Zero Coalition and All Aboard Alliance. With the ever-evolving landscape of Global Maritime Forum initiatives, the website also needs to make it easier to understand what the community around the Forum is doing and trying to achieve.

“The Global Maritime Forum community involves hundreds of companies, organisations, and people who all need to stay updated on the latest developments, access information, find content, and be able to see themselves and their contributions,” Jørgensen said. “We want to expand this community of action, so we also need to clearly communicate to newcomers what we do and where it could be relevant for them to engage.”

The process of designing and developing the new website was expertly led by 1508, an agency of individuals dedicated to developing sustainable solutions. The new Global Maritime Forum site uses Contentful as the content platform. Contentful offers a modern approach to content management, allowing the editors of this website to manage content more easily. As part of their commitment to volunteerism, pro bono work, and climate action, Contentful has kindly made their services available pro bono to organisations such as the Global Maritime Forum, dedicated to driving positive societal impact.

“The website is not ‘done’. It is a 1.0 version, and as we get insights into how visitors use the website, and as our community comes up with new projects and initiatives, we will make changes and evolve it as needed,” Jørgensen said.

Multiple online tools are available for evaluating a website’s carbon footprint.