Assignment 1

From both a business perspective as well as that of a web designer, The Mars Society (http://www.marssociety.com) and The Enterprise Mission (http://www.enterprisemission.com/) are quite fascinating to look at. Private space exploration has been historically unavailable to citizens. That has changed recently with the advent of companies like Virgin Galactic. It is my opinion that both these sites fail to properly convey their message of space exploration to their visitors. These organizations obviously have missions they’re trying to accomplish, and in today’s day and age, their website is the best method to transmit that message. I will analyze these websites using the perspective of a citizen interested in Mars Exploration. I want to know what makes each organization unique, and how I could become involved with them.
The Enterprise Mission website is the bigger “joke” of the two. The physical appearance of the website reminds me of a play on a kids website. The design is circa 1997, and while that can be acceptable for a hobby website, for an actual organization that may potentially have the desire of accepting funding, it’s unacceptable. The website is convoluted, hard to read, graphically busy and ridiculous in content matter. As a visitor, I have no idea what the organization stands for. Much of the news is terribly dated and noticeably incorrect from present information. Not only is it graphically difficult to use, the information is tragically out of date. “The Mission” talks about the Mars moon, an artifact that we now know is proven to be a simple rock formation. On the plus side, the news page does seem to be updated on a regular basis.
The Mars Society site at least is more visually appealing. However, it is still rather hard to determine the overall purpose of the organization. I found a few goals, such as to establish political traction for the support of a mission to mars, but it was unclear if that’s the main goal of the organization. I believe the political approach is unique and has a better possibility of being successful than the Enterprise Mission’s.