New BBC Homepage Review
I am a big fan of the BBC website. In terms of content it is probably one of the finest websites on the net and it is my own preferred choice for news and sport. The existing website is pretty well laid out but you can tell that it was clearly not designed for the brash banner advertisements which have appeared on it in the last month. So when I visited the homepage this morning, I was very pleased to see that they were offering a new customisable homepage.
A customisable homepage, is not a new thing. Yahoo have offered this service for a very long time, while Google are also in on, along with specialist sites such as pageflakes. So what is it that BBC can bring to the market? Well thats a good question but for the moment I’m going to focus on the design of the website as I reckon it will offer a good insight into the future design of the BBC Website.
The first thing that strikes me about this page is the colour. Gone is the defacto light blue we have seen for years and in is a tasteful purple gradient. Gradients feature big on this website, with various shades of white to dark grey making an appearance. This page owes a lot to the new Apple Website but in my opinion it has been better executed.
The labeling on this site is excellent. This is due to the correct use of headers and appropriate font-weights and spacings. As like all BBC websites content is king so the photographs used are sharp and well cropped to fit in. The content is of course excellent, but what I like about this page over the normal homepage is that there is space for it to breath. The existing website suffers from content overload while the new homepage gives a larger screen resolution and cuts down on the links to give the content more space. Colour coding for certain major sections such as “World Service” makes reading so much easier that you wonder why they didn’t use it again in the footer. The footer is the weakest section of the page but it is well aligned and labeled and far easier to read than many other websites I have reviewed.
Customising news sources to the readers choice is a clever way of cutting down on irrelevant information but risky for the BBC to implement. One of my favourite features of the existing website is the “Most Emailed” or “Most Read” Top 5. This is a feature which has to to be added. The danger is that by ommitting the social aspect of news, people will tend to live in their own bubble with a resulting drop in page views. New sources should be diverse and far reaching. If I limited news sources to only my interests I wouldn’t hear or read much so BBC have to be careful. Publicly funded organisations like the BBC need page views to justify budgets. If pageviews drop, content is cut and that affects we the audience.
Overall I’m impressed that the BBC implemented a personal homepage. It is not as intelligent as Pageflakes, or as far reaching as iGoogle which has email and widgets, but it is better laid out and far more pleasing on the eye. I particularly like that there is no advertisements on it but here lies my worry. Facebook, Google and Yahoo make a fortune out of matching advertisements to their audience’s interests. Are BBC trying to present their content better or are they just trying to get to know us better?
Is Auntie Beeb looking out for us or she just trying to become Big Brother?
Posted 15.12.07
February 28th, 2008 at 1:31 am
[…] reviewed the Beta version of the BBC Homepage last December and to be honest not much has changed. Noticing the differences is a Where’s […]
March 31st, 2008 at 8:20 am
Too childly, not preferable
otherwise, the best global source of honesty on the the web.