Trent Port Services
A Singapore port consultancy with work in 47 countries and a static 2016 website. We built trent-global.com in 2020, added a marketplace site in 2021, rebuilt both in 2025 (the second as TrentGO) and have run them since.
Trent Port Services now has a site that shows its track record to cautious port operators, and TrentGO has a launch site that explains a new kind of marketplace.
What we were solving
Trent Port Services is a Singapore port consultancy and engineering firm, founded in 2016 by veterans of P&O Ports, Hutchison Port Holdings and DP World. It has worked in 47 countries, overseen more than US$3 billion of port cranes and equipment, and led a European port to an industry-first ISO 55000 certification.
In 2020 none of that came across online. The site at trent-global.com was the static page put up when the company was founded. Port operators are cautious, technical buyers, and the old site undercut every conversation before it started.
The brief kept changing after that, because the business kept changing. In 2021 Trent launched an e-marketplace for port spare parts and needed a second site. In late 2023 that marketplace became TrentGO. By 2025 the 2020 site needed replacing rather than editing. Each stage needed a site that explained the current business to a sceptical buyer, and a team that already knew the history.
How we tackled it
2020: the first build, then the care plan
Jon Arnup, founder and CEO, signed the proposal in May 2020 and the new trent-global.com went live on 12 October 2020. The design was clean and image-led, with port photography and a homepage video. Trent joined our care plan the same month. Jon's review: "We asked for 'clean and fresh', and got just that."
2021 to 2024: a marketplace site and a lighter refresh
Early in 2021 Trent completed the first transaction on its e-marketplace and by mid-year needed a public site to explain it. We built the Trent Moscord site and took it live in November 2021, with an animated screenshot of the real catalogue so visitors could see the product without logging in. At the end of 2023 Jon asked for a lighter refresh of Trent Port Services on the existing framework: condensed content, updated stats and three focus areas in place of five. It went live on 28 March 2024.
2025: the full rebuild
By late 2024 a refresh was no longer enough. Trent's positioning had moved to "independent, defensible advice" and its figures had grown again. We drafted the content before designing anything. Jon found the first homepage designs too dark and too "nuts and bolts", so the revision used illustrated imagery and a lighter palette. Proof points went into a statistics strip, and a case study template lets the Trent team add proof as client approvals arrive, without a developer. The site went live on 17 March 2025.
TrentGO: a site for a new kind of marketplace
TrentGO is the group's live procurement e-marketplace for ports: live quotes from approved sellers, landed cost shown before purchase, no licence fee. We built its 2025 site alongside the Trent Port Services rebuild, on the same templates but with its own identity, structured around how the platform works rather than corporate credentials. Adoption proof (ports in 32 or more countries) carries the trust load. TrentGO went live at trentgo.com on 9 April 2025. Jon's reply: "awesome site, our best one yet."
What we delivered
Trent Port Services now has a website it can put in front of global port operators without caveats. The track record is visible rather than implied, and a new case study is a content task, not a development project. TrentGO gives its sales team a reference point prospects can read before the first call. In its first sixteen months (May 2025 to September 2026) trentgo.com recorded 20,500 Google Search impressions and 1,320 clicks, most of them on the brand name. Both sites remain on our care plan, and the relationship is in its seventh year.
What we learned
Firms with deep track records are often the worst at showing them. Trent's numbers lived in slide decks, not on the website. Pulling them into the content draft before any design work turned the 2025 brief from "make it look professional" into "present this proof".
A long relationship is a series of correctly sized jobs. The 2024 refresh was right for that year and the 2025 rebuild right for the next. A ground-up rebuild in January 2024, when Jon wanted a lighter touch, would have been the wrong size, and he said so.
Throughout the project, they listened and accommodated all our thoughts and adapted that into what we think is our best-looking website to date.
