Transport for London (TfL) is a part of the Greater London Authority (GLA), the capital’s strategic citywide governmental body under the leadership of the Mayor of London who is in turn governed by the London Assembly. The GLA is responsible for many of the cities services including transport, policing, ire and emergency planning, economic development, culture, environment and health services.

TfL is the part of the GLA which is responsible for London’s transport system, their primary roles are to action the Mayor of London’s Transport Strategy and to manage the cities transport services. The services managed by TfL include London’s buses, The Underground, Docklands Light Railway (DLR), London Overground, Croydon Tramlink, London River Services, Victoria Coach Station, London Transport Museum, 580 km’s of main roads and all of London’s traffic lights, the Congestion Charging scheme, regulating of the cities taxi’s and private hire trade, promoting a range of walking and cycling initiatives, Dial-a-Ride and transport for people with impaired mobility.

The Transport for London website’s main aim is to provide information to the general public regarding the various transportation services included in their portfolio. Aside, from the role of providing information they also utilise this medium very effectively providing a number of useful services. In so doing they provide a public service while at the same time promoting the interest of their organisation.

The website has an easy going and fresh appearance which is in keeping with modern website design and sees to it that a user does not get tired of returning to the site time after time. A white background colour has been used, with grey, blue and black supporting colours. Other colours have also been used in a limited way providing just a hint of animation.

The home page highlights current news and features and serves as a good indicator of what one will find further-on in the website. It also directs a user to points of possible interest. The home page has been designed very effectively, keeping the amount of information minimal and adding to the user’s overall experience.

One is able to navigate the site quite easily. A labelled navigation bar at the top of each page allows the user to find his way around. At the top right of the page additional navigation features have been provided. They include accessibility, help and search functions as well as a sitemap. Each page includes additional navigational assistance in the form of tab top menus.

www.tfl.gov.uk functions very effectively with information being separated and classified quite well. Additional functions and tools have been included such as a map finder, journey planner, mobile travel alerts and service updates. These useful widgets are an excellent way of ensuring return traffic to the website. They also give the website an interactive nature allowing users to derive additional value from their use. A very convenient feature of this site is that it can be accessed through a mobile phone. This is particularly useful when information is required in a quick and mobile manner.

The site functions very well. No broken links or HTML errors could be detected. However, the loading time is average to poor and needs to be watched carefully so as not to become problematic. They may consider using an image optimization tool to ensure the images on the site are optimized.

They rank fist for many of the keywords pertaining to their scope of work. The website has a high search engine inclusion rating as well as a high link popularity score. Their meta tag rating is however poor, whilst title tags could be detected, description and keywords tags could not be found. Greater attention to meta tags could improve the sites visibility on search engines.

www.tfl.gov.uk has an Alexa traffic rank of 2737. A low ranking such as this indicates that they receive a large amount of traffic. This may be due to their high search engine ranking and good linking structure. They have 2127 incoming links which is also quite high.

The use of valuable content, a clean appearance and good website design all contribute to the websites ability to draw large numbers of traffic. They fulfil their purpose very effectively by providing useful information and at the same time promoting the interests of the organisation.

Although they are the authority on the London Transportation system and have no need to compete for traffic they could make use of viral marketing as well as affiliate marketing techniques to improve visibility and encourage greater awareness. This will enable them to service the needs of their interest groups more effectively.