Description
The image galleries show a comparison between the landing pages of the most “discussed” aerospace companies: SpaceX and Blue Origin. It’s possible to notice that in the beginning, Elon Musk’ SpaceX homepage was definitely rich in content, giving priority to declaration of intent about further missions. While nowadays, the communication within’ the web page, is focused on the successful launches that the company is constantly delivering. By contrast, Blue Origin has never uploaded the webpage so frequently. Over the years, their vision has always been held in the foreground, focusing the attention of the user over the subscription button. Despite fewer updates, it’s interesting to notice how the website insists more on user engagement through the newsletter, in a service oriented communication format.
The treemap visualization aims to display differencies between the two websites sections. The two different colors match the private company considered. Each treemap layout is related to a section of the website, and is in turn divided according to the type of content. All the contents displayed concern visuals and texts. Visual contents are clustered in photographies, renderings, videoclip and concept videos, technical drawings. For what concerns the text contents, they include descriptions, technical reports and call to action.
Protocol
To deliver this protocol, the Wayback Machine has been used as tool to retrieve past versions of the websites. After a preliminary scraping, the research has focused on 6 months per year: the timeframe include one webpage every two months. This interval has been considered as an average timing to observe effective variations. The first date taken into consideration is 2008, a memorable date for SpaceX, that on September 28th succeeded in its first launch with Falcon 1 rocket. Instead, the first useful version of Blue Origin website goes back to November 26th 2011 and it hasn’t been updated until 2015: in the same year, on April 29th the company achieved the launch of its first spacecraft, the New Shepard 1. All the landing page stamps have been collected manually.
To deliver this protocol, the Wayback Machine has been used as tool to retrieve past versions of the websites. After a preliminary scraping, the research has focused on 6 months per year: the timeframe include one webpage every two months. This interval has been considered as an average timing to observe effective variations. The first date taken into consideration is 2008, a memorable date for SpaceX, that on September 28th succeeded in its first launch with Falcon 1 rocket. Instead, the first useful version of Blue Origin website goes back to November 26th 2011 and it hasn’t been updated until 2015: in the same year, on April 29th the company achieved the launch of its first spacecraft, the New Shepard 1. All the landing page stamps have been collected manually. For what concerns the visual content classification within’ the website, they’ve been counted as unity through each section. Specifically for the text contents, the total amount of words per section has been calculated.