BBC 2.0

Last December the BBC introduced a beta of what would be its redesign of its homepage, after 2 months and some slight tweaks the template debuted this morning…to very mixed reviews. Looking at the first blog on the BBC Internet blog debuting the new design there are some pretty key words in the responses, ‘awful’, ‘childish’, ‘disappointed’, ‘under-utilization of space’, ‘chunky’. As a web designer (in training), I have some thoughts I would like to say, some along the lines of those reviews but some highest approval. The customization, which I believe the BBCrew were going for is brilliant, I spent first thing this morning moving all the boxes around and adjusting the lengths (moving the weather and blogs to the bottom, getting rid of children and TV, adding economy, switching news from the left to the right), it really is a job well done and its really an impressive system. I have two criticisms and 1 complaint, the 2 criticisms are that it might be a little spacey, and along with that, that its only for a 1020 screen (I understand that screens are now at this size, but for those that do have small screens will have problems, msn deals with this very well, having two sizes). My criticism is that there is no global navigation. To me global navigation is one of the biggest things about a site, something that you can get familiar with and will reduce the stress of navigating a site (particularly like the BBC). Other than that it looks really attractive, really usable and a good indicator of what makes the BBC. Here's to looking forward to the layout across all of the BBC.