Serendipity35

   Looking at websites from a design point of view this week. I came across two sites that have some things in common. Two sites for companies that want to become THE commercial spaceflight company. Both companies owned by guys with plenty of bucks to spend. What they don't have in common is DESIGN. Wildly different ends of the web design spectrum (at least as of today).

First we have http://public.blueorigin.com from Jeff Bezos (Mr. Amazon.com), who says of his space group that they are "working, patiently and step-by-step, to lower the cost of spaceflight so that many people can afford to go and so that we humans can better continue exploring the solar system."

The site is real basic. Looks like a web design novice built it. Even the photos look more snapshot than photography. I'm sure Bezos has access to some top-notch designers from Amazon.com. So - what's the strategy here?

Then we have Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic - "the world's first spaceline." Check out their site so that you can become one of the first non-professional astronauts. The site is slick. Space travel slick. You can choose the HTML version http://www.virgingalactic.com/flash.html or the cranked up Flash version at http://www.virgingalactic.com/htmlsite/index.htm So Virgin Galactic looks like what you would expect from a big company (especially one heading off the planet).

Can we make any comparisons here to the simple, plain, vanilla Google home page and the busy, all kinds of stuff going on here Yahoo! home page? Google and Yahoo! both work. If you are a supporter of the Jakob Neilsen school of web usability & design (I'm not), then Blue Origin is the right approach.

As we redesign our NJIT website and I look at other school sites, I see more & more flash (and Flash) and I wonder if it's a good trend. I'd hate to see us go the Nielsen route though. Where is the Venn diagram that tells us where usability and beautuful design overlap?