[Robert Bing]

Virgin Blue has unveiled its fresh, new website virginblue.com.au which has been specially designed to make navigation around the popular site even easier for travellers looking for key information or to book flights.

Since Virgin Blue launched in 2000 the website, which receives around 130,000 hits per day, has been the airline’s main channel for the majority of flight bookings and over 90 percent of Guests now choose to select and book their travel online.

Moving away from the original colour palate of mostly red and blue, the refurbished website now features a crisp white background for easier readability with splashes of red to preserve Virgin Blue’s heritage and link to the Virgin brand.

The new website was designed with the input of public focus groups and surveys of key market segments to create a site that is truly user-friendly from the page layout and content menus to the pictures and colours used.

To improve the accessibility and usability, special features have been incorporated into the new site including dropdown menus and index pages, the ability to select different font sizes to assist readers with vision impairments, and more useful and logical ‘next step’ and ‘related information’ links designed to help travellers find the information they want with a minimum amount of effort.

Virgin Blue Chief Executive, Brett Godfrey, said, “Our website is the most dynamic communication tool available to us and given that an increasing number of travellers prefer the convenience of online services whether they are browsing or buying, we are committed to evolving with the needs of our Guests and finding ways to make their experience with our website both useful and positive.”

More images of Virgin Blue team members and special messages have also been incorporated throughout the site to provide a more personalised and friendlier experience.

As well as refining the appearance of its website Virgin Blue has built the site to be scalable for future initiatives to enable it to display and promote all the great new products and partnerships the airline has in the pipeline.

The new site is compatible with the latest versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Flash and was designed by Webqem.