Nil Ocean Shipping: a freight site with quote requests and tracking

The challenge

Nil Ocean Shipping is a Dubai company that coordinates ocean freight, freight forwarding, transit cargo and inland transport, including road haulage in Iran for cargo from Bandar Abbas and Chabahar, with a commercial focus on China, the UAE, Iran and Iraq. A freight quote depends on details such as the origin and destination port, the container type, the weight and volume, the Incoterm and the date the cargo is ready, and the more of them arrive with the first request, the less back and forth the sales team needs before it can reply. The site also has to let customers follow a shipment's status, and with no carrier data feed behind it, that status has to come from the company's own operations team. It has to serve readers in English, Arabic and Persian, and the company's brand book calls for service-led navigation and a visible way to request a quote on the website, while its voice rules out unsupported promises such as “fastest” or “worldwide coverage”.

What we are doing

We are designing the site in the company's own colours, navy and white with sea blue and a restrained gold, and the home page puts three actions first: request a quote, track a shipment and contact sales. The plan is eight core pages, a page for each service and five trade lane pages to start, all edited from one content management system, where more lanes can be added later. The quote form is designed to ask for what a freight quote depends on and to take a packing list or commercial invoice with the request; each request will get a reference, the customer an acknowledgement and sales an email, and the request will wait in the panel with its status and internal notes, ready to export as CSV. For tracking, the operations team will record each shipment's status and milestone dates by hand, and a customer will look it up with a B/L, booking or reference number and an access code and see only the approved status, while documents and internal notes stay private and a wrong or unauthorised search reveals no shipment details. English leads, with Arabic and Persian versions laid out right to left, each language with its own addresses and language tags for search engines.

What we are building

• English, Arabic and Persian, with Arabic and Persian right to left
• Three actions first: request a quote, track, contact sales
• Quote requests with their documents, each given a reference
• Tracking by B/L, booking or reference number and an access code
• Five trade lanes to start, with room to add more from the panel
• Documents and internal notes kept out of public view

Where it stands

The site is in design, and niloceanshipping.com is not live yet. 4AI has drawn the site's structure and a first design concept for desktop and phone. The work covers the public pages in three languages, the quote request workflow with its documents, shipment tracking kept up to date by the operations team, and a panel with separate roles for admin, content, sales and operations. Nothing about the company's routes, services, partners or contact details will be published until the company has approved it, and tracking will show the milestones its team records, not a live vessel position.

The parts of the system