Five by Five

A bit late to the party on this one, but hey better late than never! bbc.co.uk is one of the most visited sites in the UK and rightly so. It is a virtual treasure trove of information and fun. I have to admit I spend probably more time on it than is good for me, in particular the sports pages! It is also a site that I have long admired because of the fact they have always had clear and defined guidelines in developing and managing content for the site. In short it is a site I’d love to work on more given the opportunity.

Even though they have clear and defined guidelines and have in the past been a shining beacon of web site design, in the age of web 2.0 bbc.co.uk as a whole was becoming a bit stale. However because of the fact so many people visit it I can quite confidently say that most people will have noticed that the site, or more accurately sites, have changed quite a bit this year, and mostly for the better.

Let’s start at the beginning, the BBC homepage. I hope I’m right in saying this was the first part of the site to get an upgrade, and boy what an upgrade. I’m going to put aside for the moment the visual refresh and pick up on that later, instead I am going to focus on the level of customisation the page offers. This page gives you the user the control over what you consider most important, and therefore what you would like to see when you visit the page. Information has been divided up into modules most of which you can add/remove/rearrange to your hearts content. Don’t car about children’s content, remove it, want to see more stories about science and technology add more. In addition to this you can also set you location which is then used by the various modules to offer up more relevant content to you. Set your location to Southampton and you get to see weather in Southampton and news from Hampshire. This is obviously not a new concept and customisable home pages like Netvibes and iGoogle have been around for a number of years, but somehow I feel the BBC have done it in a very clear, usable and under stated way. I have heard some call for the ability to add your own modules, I for one am against this idea and would much prefer the control of what can appear to sit in the BBC’s hands. This kind of functionality is best left for sites which prime focus is such functionality.

OK so back to the visual refresh, the first thing that popped straight out at me is that it is wider. This to me heralds a new age for general web design. For quite a while now we as an agency have in general, although not exclusively, designed our sites for 1024 and above resolutions. That decision though was more a reflection of our target audiences, it has been accepted that in general our users had higher spec machines. There has however always been an argument that by designing for this we are cutting out the experience of a percentage of the audience who have a lower resolution. The BBC’s decision to move to this resolution says to me that the general population (and not just our select audiences) of the UK is browsing at this resolution, and if that’s not a ringing endorsement then I don’t know what is.

On the technical side the site has switched from a table based layout to a strict XHTML semantic mark-up standard. The new design also gives creative’s a far greater degree of flexibility than the old template system. The extra width allows for the use of more white space which is essential in pages where there is a large amount of information to display. Overall its dragged the site into the web 2.0 era.

To complement the new design the BBC have released a visual language guide which is nothing short of superb and spells out concepts and guidelines for design that I have long struggled and failed to put across. Anybody out there who is interested in applying a little science to their creativity should read this guide and indeed many of the public documents that form the guidelines for developing to BBC standards. Quite a benchmark.

So as you can tell I like what the BBC is doing, but are they doing anything wrong? Of course nobody’s perfect My main criticism is that I am having to discover these upgrades myself. If the BBC team happen to write about an update all well and good but I as a user need to discover these upgrades myself or stumble across them. It would be good to have a feed of latest developments, or even better a homepage module that described site upgrades! I recently commented about this on one of the blogs and got pointed at this (non BBC) resource. A good start but I’d prefer something a bit more official. This brings me on to my second criticism which is the amount of time it takes for these upgrades to roll out. The sport site was updated a couple of months ago but there are still many parts of the site which are in the old page style, or has content in the old style dropped into the new template. Surely it can’t be that hard to update them all, but then again I don’t work for the BBC so am no authority on this. Perhaps information on when upgrades are due could be added to a recent upgrades feed?

So the future looks exciting for the BBC sites, we can look forward to more developments to bring all sections of the site in line with the new visual language, DNA anyone? More customisation probably on pages other than the homepage. And hopefully to us as an agency more opportunity to work with the BBC