A premier commercial space company that specializes in the development of space habitats, which will be used by a number of space organizations, as well as the ISS. It has a quite exclusive customer base made up of government space agencies and commercial space companies that conduct research in microgravity.
The American company, which is based in Las Vegas, Nevada, offers a range of space products in various stages of development such as:
Bigelow Aerospace partners with some of the top space brands in the development and marketing of their products. Some of their notable partners include NASA, United Launch Alliance, SpaceX, and Boeing.
The Bigelow Aerospace brand logo is unique in that it contains two oldy-worldy color gradients and is made up of italicised wording in both blue and red. Because the red is light and the blue is dark the logo doesn’t sit very well on dark backgrounds, so a white border has been added to help improve visibility and readability. Despite not being in the launch business the logo also contains a graphic to represent spaceflight, which is common to the majority of space industry brands.
The layout of the website is also quite unique in that the homepage has a severe lack of textual content and relies on large images in a slideshow. The company makes use of high-quality images and video clips and textual content is divided into short brief sections that are easy to read through. Despite this the text size in the footer area is tiny, making it difficult to navigate to sub-pages of the website, which is a shame because there are lots of great images of other spacecraft not linked to in the main top navigation of the site.
Due to lack of redirection of multiple urls that show the same content, most pages can be accessed via 4, yes, 4 different urls. For example you can see the homepage at the http, the https, the http://www and the https://www urls. Another minor issue that could easily be overcome is that 56 pages, including the homepage, don’t have a valid doctype declared. However, the site has no broken internal links or missing images – which not only helps Google enjoy an efficient crawl, but also help build trust with visitors.
The site has visible social media links for those who want to keep updated with the latest from Bigelow, however finding the contact page and learning more about how to work with the company is difficult, to say the least. With no real call to action elements or an easy way to see what is on offer, the brand seems not to want visitors to do anything but read the 2 visible news items and follow them on the social networks.
