News WTF? :eek:

Scouse

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Just because they fucking idolise the ipad at the beeb does it really mean that they have to fuck up all their websites to make them function better on their non-primary platforms? :(

Bag. Of. Shite.
 

caLLous

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Yeah I saw this was coming in the transfer deadline day live text yesterday, we shall see. The beeb sport page is probably one of my regularly visited pages. It better be good. :(

I hope they have tweaked the live text for matches, I don't like the fact they feel the need to have a picture at the top. In the centre column, you have a picture of someone relevant to the match, then the teamsheets and stats (collapsible) then the live text (also collapsible). In the right hand column, you have the over prem matches and then the table. I can collapse the teamsheets and stats but I can't make it fit in a smallish window so I can see the scores from other games and the livetext of whichever game I'm tracking. They should fuck that picture off when the match has started or make it collapsible or something.

Bugs me is all. :(
 

DaGaffer

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Biggest Apple fanbois in the world. The only way you can get the international (paid) versions of iPlayer is on iPhone/iPad. Having said all that, every time I look at analytics for our site (an online department store) the penetration of Safari mobile gets higher and higher; it was ahead of Firefox and only just behind Chrome over Christmas, so there is some logic in what the BBC are doing, but it does leave a bad taste in my mouth that a public service is effectively giving Apple a content head start.

*edit* I actually don't mind the new sports site design. The old one was looking a bit tired and unwieldy.
 

caLLous

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To be fair to them it's actually quite nice. I prefer the menu across the top, I've only really looked at the football pages but it all looks quite pleasant. The "Scores, Results & Fixtures" bit on the right and the table underneath are nicely done. Not sure about the headlines column down the middle but time will tell.
 

Scouse

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To be fair to them it's actually quite nice. I prefer the menu across the top, I've only really looked at the football pages but it all looks quite pleasant. The "Scores, Results & Fixtures" bit on the right and the table underneath are nicely done. Not sure about the headlines column down the middle but time will tell.

What are you browsing on?
 

Tom

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It looks like the BBC stuffed all the images and links in it's mouth, and then coughed them over the screen.
 

DaGaffer

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It looks like the BBC stuffed all the images and links in it's mouth, and then coughed them over the screen.

Main stories on the left, headlines in the middle, video and reference content on the right, and a simple top nav. Its fine. The old one wasted space with nav links down the left, forcing the news and reference content into narrow columns. Speaking as someone who's launched sports sites themselves (albiet with about 1% of the BBC's budget), it does a good job of collating a variety of feeds, and what you're not seeing in the UK is that the width of the right column is being dictated by advertising (its the width of an MPU ad unit), which stops forrin freeloaders abusing your licence fee.

The biggest change is deeper down; they seem to have abandoned their forums and comments systems to Twitter and Facebook, which will save them a ton of cash and regulatory headaches, but I personally think "community" is an area the BBC should regard as part of its remit ("to educate, entertain and inform"), rather than abandoning that job to American corporations.
 

Raven

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People still see internet adverts?
 

Tom

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Main stories on the left, headlines in the middle, video and reference content on the right, and a simple top nav. Its fine. The old one wasted space with nav links down the left, forcing the news and reference content into narrow columns. Speaking as someone who's launched sports sites themselves (albiet with about 1% of the BBC's budget), it does a good job of collating a variety of feeds, and what you're not seeing in the UK is that the width of the right column is being dictated by advertising (its the width of an MPU ad unit), which stops forrin freeloaders abusing your licence fee.


The bar at the top changes colour when I hover on it, which is annoying. The headlines, which one would presume are the most important topics, are squashed in the middle of MASSIVE pictures and HUGE accompanying text. Everything is too close together, it's like trying to read five things at once.

They've obviously taken inspiration from the Daily Mail's website, which despite its content is actually quite good. The trouble is, this isn't. That's probably why I tend to get my news from Reddit.
 

DaGaffer

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The bar at the top changes colour when I hover on it, which is annoying.

Yeah that's weird, especially as that's the top nav for the whole BBC "portal" but they don't do the changing colour thing on other sites, like News.

The headlines, which one would presume are the most important topics, are squashed in the middle of MASSIVE pictures and HUGE accompanying text. Everything is too close together, it's like trying to read five things at once.

I think they're using "Headlines" in the proper (old fashioned) newspaper sense of "summary of key stories", rather the more modern (News International) HEADLINES to indicate front-page news. It actually means the squeeze more above the fold. I suppose it comes down to how comfortable you are with parsing a lot of info at once; it doesn't feel much busier to me than say, The Guardian.

They've obviously taken inspiration from the Daily Mail's website, which despite its content is actually quite good. The trouble is, this isn't. That's probably why I tend to get my news from Reddit.

Not really; the Mail is a three column design that's actually inspired by the "widget dashboard" design methodology pioneered by netVibes that was popular a couple of years ago; The BBC themselves did it on their own homepage as did Google (my Google) and quite a few others, but everyone's moved away from it because it started to make everyone's sites look too generic. The beeb have gone for an uneven column width and different font sizes so your eyes are drawn left first (I'm guessing that was a battle won by the editorial people over the ad people because bizarrely most people's eyes go to the right first when looking at web pages, despite 3000 years of western civilisation teaching us to read from left to right). I think the centre column is a bit squeezed, but it seems to be easier on the eye once you get into the individual sports pages rather than sports home which suffers from trying to balance its real estate across too many sports. I bet most people deep link to their preferred sports anyway. The yellow is a bit questionable as well; its quite distracting.
 

Ch3tan

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The sport website is much less of a cluster fuck than the main bbc site. This actually works, I can navigate around it very easily.
 

mr.Blacky

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For some reason I cant keep certain things collapsed. Is that just me?
 

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