BBC website: experiments in convergence
It hasn’t exactly crept up on me. I was aware of the BBC plans, as I was working on a similar design build at my last editorial management job. Ajax technology, the dashboard, coverging media, putting the user in control as the philosophy behind the new careers site, Creative Choices. But now the BBC changes are here, like a number of other people (and not all of us are naturally averse to change) I’m very unsure. No, I’m clear. It’s the turning back of the clock… the ‘room to breathe’…
I’m not talking about summer. As one of the most popular sites in the UK, a large percentage of the online audience will have noticed, and had a reaction to, the BBC’s new design. Reading the Sports Editor’s blog on how the changes have filtered down to BBC Sport the revamp is explained as a need to maintain pace with convergence:
Much of the talk in media and technology circles is around convergence, with the boundaries between radio, TV and new media blurring all the time. Audiences are entitled, and increasingly expect, to get the best mix of words, still images, moving pictures, audio and interactivity in one place, on a single platform. That’s what we need to be able to offer our users, which means updating both the look and feel and the functionality of bbc.co.uk/sport.
This makes sense for a big hitter as the BBC, and you can see the importance to the corporation of adaptation.
The Sports Editor has also done a welcome chronological montage of the major site changes over the last eight years, from yellow back pages and Web1.0 right bang up to date with new technologies such as AJAX for its drag’n'drop homepage dashboard, reminiscent of netvibes.com and iGoogle. The problems as I see them are… More »
