Dear BBC - I am not blind
27 Feb 2008 by Andrew Banks in Websites
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.
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This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 27th, 2008 at 11:41 am and is filed under Websites. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
On February 27th 2008 at 1:01 pm, Matthew Hill said :
Yes, some nice functionality in there, but overall I think this is a disappointing effort from the BBC. The use of a changing colour is a big mistake in terms of their brand — this would make much more sense to remain red, matching their TV profile and branding.
Hate the use of Verdana for headings. It’s fine for body copy, but looks clunky and amateur as headings.
I agree they’ve made excellent provision for those without javascript, that’s highly commended.
I like the clock too but purely from an aesthetic, nostalgic point of view — looks like the one that sat in front of the News TV slot about 20-30 years ago… 
On February 27th 2008 at 2:35 pm, Gavin Mitchell said :
I quite like it personally. They’ve had a beta version available for quite a while, so I don’t think you could accuse them of rushing it out.
In fact, I’m already starting to think that the interior pages are looking dated 
On February 27th 2008 at 2:43 pm, Andrew Banks said :
Gavin,
Thanks for the feedback.
I previously commented on the beta as did quite a few others (290+) on the BBC website and it appears that a lot of the comments have been ignored.
I’m all for beta testing of sites and I really think it helps not only to prove the software/website works correctly but to also break users in gently and to also generate a lot of online PR about the upcoming release.
However, the core purpose of beta testing should still be to take comments on board to improve the product - in this case I don’t this has been done sufficiently.
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On February 27th 2008 at 12:04 pm, Richard Michie said :
I agree. The functionality is good. But the layout and navigation needs a lot of work. No one has thought through how much scrolling’s needed and the really annoying thing is that when you click a link it still uses the old layout. You’re right they’ll refine the design over time but maybe they shouldn’t have been so quick to implement it.