BBC redesigns: world news now a bland blog
by Brian Turner
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The BBC continues to redesign and develop it’s website, with the BBC News section of the site now being rolled out to a new design.
Curiously, it makes BBC News look less like a world beating news source, as much as a common news blog.
While the previous design was rich in graphics and multimedia displays (top left), the new design (bottom left) appears more minimalist by far, with other stories of interest simply appearing as links on the right, instead of graphics and links:
The site is left looking uninspiring, as if someone just took a free Wordpress theme and made minor modifications to it.
Heck, it looks like anybody set up the template - not a high-flying web designer, but instead a webmaster with a little experience of blogging.
It makes my own personal attempts to skin a website look comparatively world leading by comparison - even though BBC News has no less than 8 different CSS files and 10 different Javascript files called up from a story page.
I’m sure there are various small bugs to iron out - and I’m also sure a lot of people will resist the changeover simply because it’s different.
However there remains a profound criticism that the BBC has dumbed down the look of BBC News - in trying to move away from looking like a world’class news site, and in attempting to look like just another news blog, it denigrates it’s big Unique Selling Point (USP) of being world class.
In doing so, it can only make news blogs on other sites - which have little budget for design and development - simply look more competitive.
Which can only be of benefit to the blogosphere, not the BBC.
The only hope for the BBC is that the design is still at an early stage, and that the look will see considerable work carried out on it as the new design rolls out.
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There’s some good stuff about it - the new flash videos are a lot easier to view than the old pop-ups with realplayer or windows multimedia clips. Definitely an improvement there.
But the layout is sloppy. The old layout was tight, well designed, properly laid out. True the new layout will stretch to your screen width but it wastes space and doesn’t fit to a grid so you can’t really see where you are within the site without having to have a good old hunt round the screen.
Also I like the little picture captions on the old site. Now we just have text titles - I can go to newsnow for that, if the bbc is going to be hours behind a news aggregator like newsnow it needs to provide better quality content, now it’s the worst of both worlds.
Maybe it’s just like that in firefox but I have intention of using IE to test the site - I only use it to test my own sites :)
I’ve got to admit, I’m liking elements of it better since using it - I’m a real stickler for change. :)
However, it still looks like a blog, and the featured content doesn’t look much better in terms of presentation than you could get with a few stock photos and $10 to an Indian webdeveloper.
Cynical, though, I am, humm. :)