Virgin America Launches Cool New Website

A complete redesign of a company’s website is no trivial undertaking. It’s expensive, time-consuming, and fraught with potential technical glitches.

It’s also an opportunity to reinforce a company’s branding, or to rebrand altogether.

After a blackout period of several hours, during which its site was offline, Virgin America today launched a new version of its virginamerica.com website.

Virgin American makes much of the new site’s so-called “responsive design.” What that means: “The new website will allow guests to view and navigate the full website, no matter what device they use. The new front end will allow guests to have a much smoother mobile booking experience, in particular.”

What that means in practice, visually, is that each page is dedicated to a single function, with just a few large images, decidedly cartoonish in style. It’s as though the site were designed first and foremost to be viewed on the small screen of a smartphone, rather than on a desktop’s expansive monitor.

Test-navigating the site on my 23-inch monitor, it sometimes felt as if I were viewing a site that had been designed for the visually impaired, and for someone with the mental age of a pre-teen. The word “goofy” came to mind. Also, “fun.”

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Speaking of fun, the booking app makes use of avatars, optionally, to represent the user and other members of his party. Penguins, pandas … you know, cute.

And speaking of booking, that’s what any airline’s website is all about, ultimately, and it’s where Virgin America’s new site excels. The step-by-step pages and oversized images make for a smooth, intuitive experience, whether it’s via an iPhone or a mega-monitor.

Bottom line: The overall look and feel of the site may be initially off-putting, but it serves its purpose extremely efficiently.

Reader Reality Check

Is Virgin America’s new site design a step forward for airline websites, or a gimmicky outlier?

This article originally appeared on FrequentFlier.com.