New BBC Homepage Goes Live
Yesterday saw the long awaited introduction of the new BBC Homepage. A countdown calendar had been in place for the preceding days building up to the big launch. Having already seen the near complete version in Beta testing the new homepage is not a major shock, but I imagine it is for the casual web user.
I 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 Wally style game of looking for minute changes in colour and shape. Read More
Posted 27.02.08New NME Website Design
I have to say I’ve been waiting to review this one for a while. The new NME website design has been in the pipeline for a few months now. Before the site was remodeled this week the new look and feel was debuted on their news page about 3 months ago. Such a prolonged roll out is rare to see these days but it has been worth the wait as the new design is a great improvement over the last website.
A bit of background first: NME or (New Musical Express) is a music magazine catering for the 16-30 age group. It has been around since 1952 and been going strong ever since. It is a controversial magazine, dividing music lovers opinions. Some say they seek to generate hype rather than publish balanced opinion while many people enjoy the sensationalism and energy in their journalism. Read More
Posted 15.02.08Illy - Website Design Classics
Sometimes I find reviewing websites is like meeting people. This is especially the case when it comes to reviewing our favourite products or companies. We are often told that we should never meet our heroes but I’ve never had much meas for that myself. Today’s website is that of one of my favourite products, Illy Coffee.
As any barista will tell you, Illy make excellent coffee. Whenever I’m in a foreign city I look for the Illy sign to dictate what coffee shop I should call to. Not only do I like the product but I also appreciate the way Illy handle their branding. Their logo is simple, distinctive and clear. Their packaging leads the way not just in terms of aesthetics but in functionality - those famous silver tins preserve coffee much better than highly stressed tinfoil. Read More
Posted 22.01.08New Car Magazine Website Review
Car Magazine, is arguably the worlds finest publication for automotive enthusiasts. For decades they have been an institution and a standard bearer in terms of journalistic quality, photographic excellence and exquisite packaging. For many years whatever Car Magazine did with their publication, other magazine and journals followed. However while being an icon in the print world, Car Magazine were incredibly slow to embrace the online medium.
This changed about 18 months ago when they launched their first venture online. While the journalistic quality was very good and images by in large excellent, the design of the site was disappointing. It was not a bad website but not in keeping with the quality of design in the printed article. As I have stated before, integrating off line and online is the name of the game. Harrods do an excellent with their website, so I was glad to see yesterday that Car Magazine have spruced up their website. Read More
Posted 17.12.07New 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 15.12.07About.com Showing Graphic Images on its Website
I received in my inbox yesterday an email forward regarding a grizzly bear. The email contained a powerpoint presentation of the story of a hunter who had killed the supposed largest grizzly bear in the world. The email contained amongst several images, one particularly gruesome image which was quite awful and which I will not link to.
I decided to Google “Giant Grizzly” in order to find out if it was all one big hoax, in the hope that it was. The first result on the list was a page on About.com’s own directory of urban legends. The About.com page regarding this email forward actually contained the same graphic image that I was so apalled by. About.com did place a warning above the image warning viewers it was a graphic and it was not suitable for people of a sensitive disposition.
The trouble with About.com’s warning was that it was on a page designed for 800*600 resolution and the warning was “above the fold” for that resolution. On my 1920*1200 resolution screen the image was dead centre, meaning that their warning was completely useless, and that the majority of users using (1024*768 or 1280*1024) would have seen some part of the image whether they wanted to or not.
This is not a post about email forwards, because these things will happen. This is about a large corporation hosting images which are quite frankly sick and gruesome and also failing to protect users. Just imagining what effect this image would have on a 7 year old child is quite upsetting. If About.com insist on hosting this image at the very least have a blur filter on it until it is clicked and give people the chance to bypass the page. Just guessing people’s screen resolution and putting it below the fold is not good enough. This is lazy web programming and poor customer relations.
Update your Website! (before you get sued)
Posted 06.12.07Accenture - Update your Website
Today’s website that is up for evaluation is that of Accenture. Accenture are one of the largest consultancies in the world and have operations all around the world. Their logo is respected as being one of the best modern corporate identities and by in large they have quite a positive media profile. However, for all their prowess Accenture have dropped the ball on their homepage.
In comparison to most corporate websites, Accenture’s homepage is concise and short. Now while this may appear positive, it is not. Their is no point being short if means you lose context. In the case of the Accenture website, this short homepage is a very poor road map of the corporate website. In some ways it is more reminiscent of a late 90’s splash screen than the shop front of one a large consultancy.
Navigation on this website, is a dog’s breakfast of poor accessibility. The upper left hand side of the screen is screaming for some text links, but text is relegated to a few sundry items at the bottom of the screen. What we have instead is Flash, and lots of it. The primary navigation is not only Flash but DHTML-style dropdown Flash menus. Have these people not heard of accessibility? Frankly I am appalled that a company with no shortage of resources should choose to create a website that shuns the visually impaired. It is not good enough. You might forgive Accenture if they couldn’t afford or if it was beautifully done, but it is neither. Change it!
Give the lack of quality navigation the search box is given quite an amount of prominence, being displayed in isolation at the top of the screen. I reckon it gets used a lot.
This page doesn’t really have much to redeem it. The site is based around an uninspiring and quite poor picture of Tiger Woods. In the way they use Tiger we are meant to presume that Accenture associate them with excellence on a par of Mr. Wood’s golf talent. But why use that image? Why use an image of Tiger seemingly swallowing a wasp rather than with him powerfully striking the ball into the distance. Such an image would convey an ability to deliver on ones’ goals and that of an agile, successful enterprise. instead we get the mental picture of some old guys sitting around, not able to see what the objective is and looking thoroughly miserable.
If I were a prospective client and I wanted a web project to be delivered I would not have any faith in Accenture based on this embarrassing performance.
Accenture you say you know what it takes to be a tiger, how about you actually deliver like Tiger Woods and create the best website you can. Otherwise you might be like the other tiger - on the verge of extinction.
Posted 26.11.07Gottfried Helnwein - Website Design Classics
By in large, I like to stay on the beaten track with website design reviews. I usually pick big corporates that should know better or who have the funds to produce something of high quality. However today’s review focuses on the power of one. The website up for review is that of the extraordinary artist Gottfried Helnwein. Helnwein was born in Vienna but has both Austrian and Irish citizenship, and resides in Tipperary for half of the year. His art is in one word: incredible. I’m not an art critic and I am do not possess the skills to convey the quality of this man’s work so visit the website and judge for yourself.
In my review of the McDonald’s corporate website I hit out at the fact that the corporate homepage was of very poor quality with blurred images, crappy Flash animation and lacked quality standards or coherence. Contrast this to the website of Gottfried Helnwein. This is the website of 1 man yet offers content in multiple languages and across multiple domains and the interface remains crisp, clean and intuitive.
What I like most about this is that it is an artist’s website that is easy to use, clearly presented and provides decent accessibility. Most artistic websites are full of either convoluted Flash or JavaScript. Artists forget that the work should speak for itself and not be tarted up by web trickery. Helnwein is obviously confident in his work judging by the way it is presented. His art is displayed as images plain and simple. However it should be noted that the images used are all of high quality and quite some effort has gone into presenting them in a way that is suitable for the web. There are no amateur scars of photographic over exposure or drop shadow to detract from the pieces themselves. If you are in any doubt to the quality of the work look at the image on the homepage and ask yourself how would you create that with oil and acrylic paint!
The primary navigation is immediately available at the top of the page with deeper navigation at the bottom of the page. The drop-down list at the top adds braces to the navigation belt by providing the same functionality as the deeper navigation but in the header area. By in large drop-down lists are not ideal for navigation, but if they are a back-up to traditional text or images they can work well. This is one of the finest examples of such navigation that I have found, mainly due to the well spaced writing and colour-coding.
By all accounts Helnwein is comfortable in the web setting. While his art is known for its shocking and often controversial visuals, he ironically displays the work in a way that adheres to web standards and here-in lies the key. Art should break standards and websites should adhere to standards. Helnwein excels at this whereas as most artists are happy to peddle conventional art on websites that break standards.
Gottfried we salute you.
Posted 13.11.07TG4 - Update Your Website
Sometimes you come across websites that have one or two things that need a change. Other times you find that the wrecking ball is the only option. Welcome to the TG4 website - a website that certainly needs the attention of the wrecking ball.
TG4 is the 4th largest television station in Ireland. It deals primarily with Irish language programming. In global terms it is a small TV network but it is not a small little company, it has about 80 employees and safeguards about another 300 jobs in independent production. So for a national broadcaster to have a website such as thing is disgraceful. TV networks have access to some of the finest designers and animators around so why persist with an awful website. Read More
Posted 05.11.07Mirror - Update Your Website
What we see on the web today in terms of graphics, layouts and design owes much to the newspaper industry. The printed media is the grand-daddy of website design and the two are pretty closely linked. The largest newspapers are also the largest journalistic sites on the web. Some are also some of the best looking and influential websites, such as the New York Times.
But newspapers are not perfect and they are also not the fastest to change. Having said that the web has been around long enough now, that all major media outlets should have great websites. Tabloids are different though. They don’t care. They don’t care for journalistic standards, style, information or providing a public service. Advertising income at whatever cost seems like the order of the day.
And so it is with no surprise I stumble upon the cack-handed web presence of the Mirror. The New York Times, it ain’t. The Mirror is an ugly website. A blurred, crammed vision of what a media website should be.
The images are as blurry as the cheap shots they publish in the real newspaper so at least they are consistent. The padding of elements is all over the place, so while vertical padding is fine, the horizontal spacing is too tight. There are some garish colour clashes and font-sizes seemed to have been chosen at random.
There are also too many advertisments on the homepage. These ads follow no particular template and overall produce a dogs breakfast approach to design.
So why am I reviewing a tabloid, should they know better? Yes they should. They are a multi-million pound empire and can well afford a little bit of design work. Furthermore the best part of the real paper - the witty headlines and capitalised impact fonts are not present. They have been forgotten and what is left is just a cheap hodge podge of c.1999 website design.
The owners real need to have a long hard look at themselves in the Mirror.co.uk
Posted 30.10.07