The new-look BBC News and Sport sites rolled out today, to predictable uproar from some regular users. This is a long overdue revamp and not exactly radical; it's all quite logical, quite safe and, above all, more useable. As we know, nothing at the BBC happens without a weighty phalanx of researchers and management reviewing every last pixel, so it's really not that controversial.
The BBC News website editor Steve Hermann described it as more of a refresh than a redesign, with wider pages, more space between content, new masthead and more images. Video and audio is given a higehr profile and embedded into pages and there is more cross-promotion to BBC TV and radio coverage.
"As I've mentioned previously, we are introducing embedded audio and video on the site - so that you can watch and listen within the page, rather than in a separate player," he wrote on the BBC Editors' blog.
"This should significantly improve ease of use, and should also enhance your experience when following a story - the text, stills, graphics and video should work better together as an integrated whole - and our journalists will be able to adapt their storytelling to make best use of video within the narrative, rather than apart from it.
However - users wasted no time in piling in to complain that the weather link has moved, the local news widget has gone, the masthead is too big, the font is too light, it doesn't work for speed reading, the design is too narrow and the logos clash.
Flotsam: "It's a bit like Terminal 5 - looks good and I'm sure the bugs will be ironed out eventually..."
Mr Grumpy: "A silly waste of licence-payer's money and another example of the relentless advance towards turning the Web into a Fisher-Price wonderland for simpletons."
Rob F: "The text is too 'light grey' to be read easily. It makes the news seem vague."
Care to share your thoughts?
