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James
20th May 2004, 09:17 pm
Has anyone else noticed that the BBC's homepage (http://www.bbc.co.uk) has changed again?

It's not a major change a la Glass Wall, but they've added a "bbc.co.uk home" banner at the top. In fact, it looks like they've abandoned the "BBCi" branding for the site.

I don't like it as much:

. the banner has too much empty white space
. the image does not change very much, it used to be every few hours
. not sure if the colour of the page changes with the image (it's been blue for a few days)
. somehow it doesn't seem as feature-rich, although I can't see anything missing

I can't find any mention of the redesign on the site itself but a quick look on Google news found this (http://www.journalism.co.uk/news/story871.shtml).
David
20th May 2004, 09:37 pm
I agree with your comments James. I do prefer the previous version although it's true to say that there was a lot on there and I guess some users may have found it confusing. The new one does lack something but it's difficult to put a finger on it.

Let's compare:

http://www.websitearchitecture.co.uk/watson/postimages/bbc02.jpg http://www.websitearchitecture.co.uk/watson/postimages/bbc-new.jpg
francis
20th May 2004, 10:25 pm
Sloppy coding as well - HTML4.01 Transitional doctype with XHTML style tags. Results from newly redesigned to be much more helpful W3C HTML validator (http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.co.uk%2F&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=%28detect+automatically%29&ss=1&outline=1&verbose=1#line-123) show the problems. They've also used weird attributes on the <body> tag such as marginheight that are only valid on frames. Spotty use of <Hn> tags to create the document outline (http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.co.uk%2F&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=%28detect+automatically%29&ss=1&outline=1&verbose=1#outline) as well.

The colours on the site at the moment are very BBC3 - I wonder if they'll change throughout the day as the previous site did or whether it's a deliberate thing to try and improve the poor viewing figures? It does seem to be more spaced out (maaan) than the previous design. I'm not really overly fussed on it, although it does seem easier to find things without using the browser's find facility, so in that respect it's an improvement.

I think I remember Jakob praising the BBC when it redesigned the site a while back but then critised them for calling it BBCi - I think he thought that seeing BBCi and not just BBC at the top of the page would confuse users.

Oh yuck. One click away from the nice new homepage is the music page (http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/whatson/). What happened? It looks like someone spilt coffee under the search box.
Tom
22nd May 2004, 08:19 am
It reminds me of the Post Office paying consultants £1m for the advice that they should change their name to Consignia and then another £1m for the advice that they should change it back. More money than sense. BBCi was a crackpot idea.

What is a consultant? Someone who borrows your watch, tells you the time and sends you a bill.

Someone said to me yesteday that for the first time since he stopped watching their programmes he thought the BBC had come up with an idea which justified the license fee: the proposal to make their stack of old programmes freely available on the web.

What a tragedy they did not have the same idea for the Hulton Picture Library. It belongs to the Getty.