Be Excellent To Each Other

http://news.bbc.co.uk/

I don't like it. It all seems too spaced out and the colours kind of all blend together. It's hard to focus on one story.

Agreed. I'm not sure why they felt the need to change the site. More change just for the sake of it.

Had a feeling it was gonna happen after they re-designed the BBC homepage, but they've not thought this one through. I like the "style" but they've made it difficult to read.

It's too fat now.

Bloody hell, that's horrible.

I like it, it's the same layout as before, but now instead of being squashed into a jumbled mess in the middle third of a monitor, it's actually readable.

I'm not sure though, why it took "Several months work" to zoom out to 60% and swipe the banner from the main site.

The width of the page is fine for me—after all, it's not like we're using dinky monitors anymore. However, the spacing is just borked throughout, and makes navigating the content harder. Well done, BBC!

It looks fine to me, and it looks less cluttered. Stop resisting change, grandads

I just found the old front page easier to skim through to look for stories of interest. I'm sure I'll get used to it eventually. *polishes zimmer frame*

Hilarious faux-pas. The 'Your Money' section of 'Business' still appears in the old style.

Cheeky.

Thing is, designing stuff like this is my job, and the BBC appears to be exactly half-way between totally clueless and really good. Actually, it appears to be running back and forth between the two.

The BBC home page kind of shows this in a more obvious light: the 'widgetisation' of content and personalisation now available is great, but the design is just utterly dreadful, grabbing hold of a look-and-feel that won't be here in a year or two, and creating content where text sizes are stupidly large.

With the news page, the '2.0' thing has presumably made the BBC go for the subtler colour scheme, and this largely works. However, the light key lines now make content areas less distinct, and the margin settings in the 'around' area are just stupid (there's actually a larger margin between parent heading and child content than between each link and the following heading.

On the plus side, the news site is mostly there, and only needs a few changes that could be done with a quick bit of CSS editing. The BBC home page, on the other hand, is fundamentally broken from a design standpoint.

I think I get confused when there are too many columns in a website - my eyes have to dance from place to place to try and find what I am looking for. Some blogs are impossible to read because of that, but I kind of feel the same way about the BBC website - too many columns, too many boxes, but of course I understand that they have a lot of information to fit in - I have never found navigating the BBc website to be a particularly easy task.

Talking of blogs and the like, why are MySpace pages always the ugliest things in the world?

Because they are Geocities for the 21st Century?

Because the people that created it are idiots. I'm a CSS ninja, but it took me several hours to get my MySpace page into a state that I was borderline content with. Had the designers created it using web standards, it would have been stupefyingly easy to create high-quality skins, rather like all those available for the likes of Wordpress.

I think it would be pretty funny if they implemented a new Myspace that 'used web standards', breaking every single page except those that were completely uncustomised.

I like Mimi.

After the amount of effort we had to put in yesterday just to keep the old site going until last night, I'm just glad to see the new one up and running at all.

The whitespace is horrific, and the font is too big - it looks like when you've accidently managed to change your default text size, and all the spacing gets screwed up.

It seems they've decided to make it wider, but rather than filling the space with more content, just make the existing content huge.

On the plus side, they're finally using Flash videos rather than RealPlayer, which means I can watch them at work. It's also lighter and cleaner, which is good.

It reminds me of the new BBC Weather Map, when it was first introduced with it's ridiculously south-favouring tilt - it's nearly very good, just needs some tweaking.

Is that like a less cool "Goal scoring superstar hero"?

Not only that, but if you are wanting to see the weather for Southwest Cornwall, the presenter is standing in the way 95% of the time so you see jack.

I did complain, but the BBC ignored me as usual.

The green biro probably doesn't help mind.

The swooshing camera makes seeing the west of the country very difficult indeed.

On day, you and I shall fight! Bookworm!

I like the new design, they didn't overboard on the web2.0GradientsOMG, which is nice. It's not as cramped-looking as the old one either.

It's still lacking in content though. Maybe I'm just spoiled by sites like Reddit that have loads of headlines on the main page, but the beeb only has about 10 stories, and only three of those have more than just a headline. The rest is just extraneous stuff like links to last nights Panorama.

I was about to post roughly the same thing! Animated GIFs and annoying MIDIs have now turned into embedded youtube videos and stupid flash music players that start playnig when you open their sodding page (which inevitably has some havascript to make heart shaped snow-drops fall down my screen and bring my computer to a halt). Lé sigh.

Yes.


If I've got one of my books to hand, beware. The latest volume is pretty weighty.

As for the BBC website, observe the following:

On the left is what the BBC currently has. Some quick measurements suggest that between heading and associated link there is a 17-pixel gap. Between the link and following heading, the gap is 14px. This will chance per system/browser, but not significantly. What I'd have done is something like on the right, thereby more directly associating each piece of content with its header.

As recent jobs suggest, there's nowt wrong with putting margins under headings, but you need to ensure that by doing so the content and page navigation doesn't suffer. Still, like I said, bar some colours and margins (I'm purposefully ignoring the hateful masthead gradient, obv.), this is a largely successful redesign.

I think it looks ok but it's a bit fiddly and the spacing around the scrolling banner thing at the top seems a bit broken on my iPhone.

Speaking of which, I've been put back on the case of re-doing the company website (I started a thread on this a few months back on WOS if anyone remembers) and one thing is puzzling me. If you view the front page the grey down the bottom-left and bottom-right display differently depending on whether you use IE or FF. Now is this down to 'websafe' stuff or the way that pngs are handled? :?

EDIT - Done a bit of digging and I've ended up removing the GAMA data for the PNG files which has helped. I hate messing with the look of a website - I'm much more into the functionality!

Has it changed back?

In Firefox (on the Mac at least), the search box sticks out of the side of its container by about 10px, and the 'press office' link wraps under 'about us'.

Not that I can see.

*Clears cache*

Nope.

Weird. That looks okay to me now.

The (BBC) site seems a bit weird at the moment (too much white, too much space), but I always hate new designs of the same thing for a while before it seeps into my consciousness and I end up hating the old one instead.

The one thing I think that they need alter is the Sports section. The link to it on the main page is too small. Before it was a yellow banner, and now it's just a plain link offering fewer options. Since I visit the sport pages more than any other, I feel it has been given a raw deal!

Hmm. Unsure on first impressions but maybe it'll grow on me. Bit too pastelly and seems like a lot of wasted, empty space. Maybe they are concerned about easier reading?

Also the new banner logo top right reminds me of a Cornetto wrapper and will make me want to buy an ice-cream each time I look at it.

I had to open the BBC news site via google cache to get a reminder of the changes.

I definitely prefer the old layout. The new one looks too much like an advert for some sleek,chic product

A news site should look a little messy, a little cluttered - there's a lot of news in the world, after all.

[edit]incidentally, old articles still follow the old format.
Eg:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/3518794.stm

Yeah, they've always done that tho, look for an article from 8 or 9 years ago for example....

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/1150374.stm

Malc

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/105361.stm

Does anyone else remember that layout?



Malc

No, it's obviously his way of showing how much he loves Lovefoxxx and co.

Alala! Alala!

That's because, after an hour of messing about with one, I can conclude that iPhones are rubbish at the Internet.

Also, because I wasn't doing it on a wireless LAN, I think I cost my mate some money. Whoops.

Aren't we?

Eight out of ten internet capable devices I see before me say otherwise.