The BBC have been making some changes to their main website recently. They have a new homepage and their news section has just undergone a revamp.
When did the BBC stop innovating and start imitating? Their 'new' homepage is a throwback web design trends that are already starting to look past their sell-by-date - huge fonts, rounded corners and gradients are everywhere. All the current web buzz words are also present and correct - Ajax, widgets, RSS feeds etc. And therein lies the problem: The new design just jumbles up a load of trends, and doesn't pull them off particularly well.
It simply doesn't work on a practical level. I used to like going to the BBC site to see top quality news and journalism. The stories were selected by professionals who deemed them newsworthy. What is the obsession with letting me customise everything with widgets? I don't mind a little bit of customisation, but this makes me feel like I've got to build the whole thing myself (does anybody else thing Fisher Price?) And the colour keeps changing when I click on a button which makes it seem like I have moved to a new section, when in fact all that has happened is a picture has changed.
The site isn't flexible - it has a fixed width which means that it doesn't scale for smaller browser windows. The BBC have justified this by saying that only 5% of their visitors have a screen size smaller than 1024 pixels. This makes the daft assumption that everybody keeps their browser window maximised to the full screen size. I certainly don't, which means that I miss the best thing about the new site - the old fashioned clock (in the right hand corner) that brings back happy memories when the BBC made some good programmes. In fact, the programmes on the BBC nowadays are usually pale imitations of the rubbish from other stations, so maybe the website redesign is just following corporate policy.
The site also breaks and becomes a jumbles mess of overlapping widgets when the text size is increased (something that people with limited vision might want to do to be able to read it). The image below shows what a horrible dogs dinner it looks like in my browser window with the text size bumped up two places. Notice how little information there is on view, the text is breaking out of widgets and the widgets are starting to overlap.
To add insult to injury, the BBC has changed all their audio over to the terrible iPlayer (awful name that makes it sound like a reject from the Apple drawing board). This thing is a nightmare - it doesn't work on Linux and the web browser version doesn't seem to work either, so I can't listen to repeats of radio programmes on my laptop.
A couple of experienced web designers have expressed similar views in their repsective blogs that make some valid points. I agree with Mark Boulton that the Times and Guardian have both managed to pull off much more impressive redesigns recently than the BBC (although these are, disappointingly fixed-width also).
There are some really talented and creative people at the BBC and their journalism is still, in the main, first rate. Unfortunately there also seems to be too many decision makers that are too eager to follow trends rather than set them. As license fee payers, we deserve better.
