CONNECTING WITH VIRGIN
The redesign of Virgin.com had two goals: lead generation and social activity. This weaving together of corporate and user-generated content called for a distinct creative approach that would allow the access of information, trafficking to Virgin company sites, all while providing a forum for social dialogue. The redesign sets a new standard for corporate portals with unprecedented social tools never before seen in corporate communications. The new virgin.com allows customers to intuitively find content about their favorite Virgin brands while giving them an open forum to rant, rave and even gripe.

SETTING A NEW STANDARD
The site was not part of a larger promotional campaign, but it did require the support and collaboration of the many Virgin brands around the world. The larger impetus driving the redesign and launch came from Virgin Management's vision to become more connected to its customers. Allowing users to freely submit user generated content was an incredibly bold move for the company but was critical for establishing the website as a consumer driven destination. However, its primary purpose is to serve as a lead generation portal driving customers to Virgin companies. Careful thought and planning went into how Virgin companies would be represented in the site, how they would participate in the community, and how relevant content would be delivered.

Some of the core features revolve around community and social networking. The site uses Facebook connect to more active integrate with existing social networks and openly allows user generated content. Features like the "Ask Richard" widget help connect customers and fans to the Virgin brand. Additionally, Virgin actively participates in the community responding to questions, comments and more.

Creating a profile/account on Virgin.com allows the user to send messages, befriend other members of Virgin.com, update their avatar, and comment and rate articles. But some of the more unique features include integration to Facebook using Facebook Connect, which allows users to import profile information and let friends see what they’re doing on Virgin.com. Social Currency is also tied to profile creation, which allows users the ability to score points, earn badges/achievements and increase their status. Increase in status and points allow users to become eligible for insider content and "free stuff."

The creative direction for Virgin.com's user interface was to be as reductive as possible. The clean design speaks to the seriousness of the company, and in contrast, the heavy illustrations show the unconventional character that sets Virgin apart. Maintaining this balance on the corporate pages and social pages tied them together seamlessly. Virgin.com is a simple look and feel but on-brand, with focus on the the little things such as iconography, imagery, illustration, tone of voice and functionality.

NAVIGATING A BEHEMOTH
Since Virgin.com serves more as a content and community destination than it does a conventional corporate website, the navigation and organizational structure of the site is geared more toward topics and categories. Diving into a section like Travel, the user finds travel related content published by Virgin’s travel related companies and content submitted by customers. Virgin companies become users of the site and participate in the community alongside their customers. And like customers who can create profile pages and network with friends, Virgin companies create and manage their own company profile pages. Via the navigation rollovers in the main menu bar, the companies related to each topic of interest are listed so that users can quickly navigate to the corresponding company pages.

One notable navigation element is the “global hat” at the very top of the site, containing a large amount of functionality without seeming overly dense or cluttered. The global hat also remains viewable as users scroll down to the bottom of each page. At the very left users are able to select where they live and to see all of the Virgin companies that operate in their region. At the very top right a signup form expands allowing users to sign up without requiring the entire page to reload. And for logged in users who have access to the CMS an area to the right populates the CMS dashboard allowing users to jump directly into managing content.

CROSSING OUR “T” IN TECHNOLOGY
With a site that has the amount of functionality that Virgin.com does performance is always an issue. We look at optimization from a couple angles: front end (what the users see) and backend (the application server). For front end performance enhancing we leveraged recommendation from the YSlow! plugin and paid particular attention to optimizing the site image assets, minified the javascript and css and structured the javascript and css in such a way that any given page get's what it needs and not much more. We also configured the web server to set appropriate caching times as well as on the fly compression of uncompressed files delivered to a user.

On the application server side of things we leveraged the memcached distributed caching server to store data cache, page cache and output from functions. We also made use of opcode caching since PHP projects aren't compiled. All these optimizations are done across a cluster of servers with the entire cluster undergoing multiple rounds of performance testing.

ROKKIT POWERED
The technology behind Virgin.com is Rokkan’s largest-ever implementation of our custom CMS tool: Rokkit. Rokkit is a custom-built version of Zend Framework, and it allows us to quickly incorporate emerging trends and practices while maintaining a consistent standard of quality in all projects that we execute. The flexibility of the framework allows us to quickly adapt not only to the specific needs of the Virgin company, but also to the needs of the community that they serve.

Rokkit encapsulates functionality commonly found in many social networking websites allowing ROKKAN to develop more custom and tailored features that uniquely meet the requirements of the Virgin brand. Other notable technologies include Memcached for caching and APC for opcode caching.

THE RESPONSE
Virgin.com has received an enormous amount of buzz on the web. All aspects of Virgin.com have been commented on from users all over the world, from the artwork down to the very architecture and structure of the site. Tweets were pushed back and forth about how a corporate site should be, and how Virgin was doing what most other companies should have been doing a long time ago.

By sheer volume of traffic increase, the site’s been tremendously effective. There’s been a notable increase in traffic to Virgin businesses, traffic coming into the Virgin.com site and quite a bit of buzz around the web. But given that Virgin is one of the most recognizable brands in the world some of the more telling moments of success is how the site illustrates just how far the Virgin brand extends. From airlines to space travel to finance to wine, a common reaction from the site is “Oh, I didn’t know that Virgin did that…”