One of the most prominent commercial spaceflight companies in the world, Virgin Galactic is involved in the development of commercial spacecraft that are designed to offer affordable suborbital spaceflights for tourists. For this purpose, the company develops and manufactures a range of products for both businesses and the general public, that includes:

1. Suborbital spacecraft
2. Orbital launch vehicles
3. Liquid rocket engines used to propel the spacecraft and launch vehicles

As one of the brands hoping to become a top space service providers, Virgin Atlantic also markets various space services they offer, which include:

1. The launch of small satellites and other payloads
2. Human spaceflight services into space
3. Suborbital launch for science missions

Virgin Galactic serves a large market made up of the general public, government space agencies such as NASA, as well as other commercial space companies such as GeoOptics, Skybox Imaging, Planetary Resources, and Spaceflight Services. The company also collaborates with various top space brands such as Sierra Nevada Corporation, Surrey Satellites, and Scaled Composites.

Logo & Branding

The logo Virgin Galactic use to represent their brand is somewhat unique. Composed of the branded Virgin logo, the stylised word “Galactic” and a graphic of an eye. But wait, is that eye an illustration or a photograph? Either way all those shades and details make it difficult to reproduce or print. More interestingly, the over-layed word forces designers to change the gradient colors from dark to light grey, and worse to move it around so it can be read on different background colors. Tricky. Looks good though.

Layout & Content

“A picture is worth a thousand words.” More than anyone else, Branson understands the value in using imagery to evoke the emotions that help people build a strong bond with a brand. As you can see from the website, graphics are used to full effect throughout. The page layouts are simple, clean and image rich. Oddly the navigation is hidden under a hamburger icon at the top of the site but visitors can access pages from the bottom menu. Or if visitors are persistent they may discover the rest of the site by clicking images in the main pages.

Usability & SEO

Created with the open-source Wordpress platform and making use of handy free plugins such as Yoast, duplicate meta titles and content are being generated for articles that have been added to multiple categories. These urls are wasting robot crawl budget and are competing with each other to rank for the same keyword phrases in Google. An example of the 2 urls created for 1 article can be seen in the general category and also the press category. Despite this the site enjoys no broken links or missing images.

Site Stats – 2017

Call to Action

Because the site is targeted at the general public (rather than being aimed at generating business from other space companies) the copy is emotive and enticing. If visitors find the “Fly With Us” link, they can register for the astronaut training program. The rest of us can follow on the social networks or sign up for email updates.