Internet page content analysis of north European Sea ports

Olli‐Pekka Hilmola ,Andres Tolli,Ain Kiisler

doi:10.1186/s41072-020-00074-y

Abstract

This study analyses 98 Internet pages of sea ports located in Sweden, Finland and Estonia during years 2017–2019. Aim of the study is to find, how website basic design is completed (colours and languages), how slogans, environmental issues, statistics and hinterland transports are reported. Based on the analysis, it appears as rather common that sea ports follow conservative selection of colours in their websites, where blue and white are clearly most popular. Typically, English and Swedish are as the most common used language, followed by Finnish, Russian and Estonian. In some rare cases, websites are offered in Chinese or German. Larger sea ports do have clear “slogans”, where smaller ones are just having lengthy justification for their existence. Environmental issues are increasing concern among sea ports, and these are mostly mentioned in details within Swedish actors. Providing statistics varies among companies, and in some sea ports these are provided from very long time period, where in others from just previous years or then only from last year (or even at all). It is common for companies to report that they have sustainable hinterland access, railway available.

Highlights

Two main contemporary trends in port logistics are related to digitalization and sustainability
Communication through websites is important for interested sea port using customers, passengers, shipping companies, hinterland transportation companies or common audience, but important for logistics operators, warehouse owners in sea port area and different types of contractors. This gives motivation for our research work through following questions: How most important public information channel, Internet websites, are used in sea port communication? What is the role of used languages, colours and environmental sustainability? Is website design and marketing communications similar among sea ports or could we find some best practices among analyzed sea ports? We try to dive deeper in the analysis of sea ports, with used disclosure indexes, which have been applied in the classification of some part(s) or entire Internet websites of corporations (Andrikopoulos et al 2013; Ahmed et al 2015; Garay et al 2013)
Completed analyses revealed that websites of sea ports in Northern Europe are rather conservative, and typically are targeted for the purposes of local economy

Summary

Introduction

Two main contemporary trends in port logistics are related to digitalization and sustainability. Sea ports are becoming more digital in their operations, and these concern traditionally paper based functions such as cargo movement authorizations from customs zones and payments of goods to suppliers (e.g. Tsiulin et al 2020). Together with these is the development of corporate communication and image, which is in digital age associated with Internet appearance through own webpages (Pan and Xu 2009; Ageeva et al 2019) and social media use (Ageeva et al 2019). Sustainability (concerning dimensions of social, environment and economy) has become important issue to be dealt and properly communicated in logistics and supply chains

Methods

Findings

Conclusion