The length of time that the message is displayed depends on the type of message. Some messages relate to items which have start and end dates which can be used to dictate how long the message is displayed for. For example, service messages are displayed until the start date of the service are in the past. In other cases, it may be appropriate for a message to be replaced by another message, for example, a message which informs a citizen of their last payment can be displayed until their next payment is made which will result in a new message to replace the old one. In this case, a configuration setting is also provided which will allow the agency to decide if they want to replace messages in this way or whether they want to define a number of days after which the message is removed. The duration of messages from remote systems are based on the expiry date defined in the web service.