Posts tagged ‘redesign’

Dear BBC - I am not blind

February 27th 2008 by Andrew Banks in Websites4 Comments »

Well it’s a sad day for the BBC Website in my opinion.

They’ve finally gone live with the new BBC homepage and I really don’t see why it needed to change. As I’ve blogged about previously, the BBC have often lead the way with their homepage but this time I think they’ve hit rock bottom.

Some excellent features have made there way into the new homepage but overall I’m just not convinced.

What I like:

• The ability to specify my own content
• Allowing me to re-organise the homepage based on how I like the page to be laid out
• Strangely, the clock. But only from a geeky technical perspective
• The fact it works just as well (or at least degrades gracefully) without JavaScript - well done to the technical team responsible for this

What I dislike:

• That 25% of my screen is dominated by the main image
• That the whole colour scheme changes dependant on which main image/feature I view - very off putting
• The size! Man, the BBC must have some research that shows the majority of their website audience are visually impaired because the sheer scale of every screen element is huge. I myself, like the majority of web user, have good vision so please don’t give me a website that is so large by default
• Web 2.0 overkill - the whole page just looks like the design team looked for every Web 2.0 cliché and put it into one page

Hopefully this will develop like all previous BBC home pages and some of these niggles I have will be removed over time.