bbc.co.uk

IIRC it did when it was in beta. It was messy and more difficult to navigate.

Oh right. I can sort of understand why...
A bit of dynamicity would be good.


On a slightly unrelated note: they've got a separate colour for the features in the diamond jubilee site

Nice to see a bit of flexibility.

Hopefully it won't just be me interested in this

The live pages on the Sport website have fallen over again today. A dreadful time for it to happen, what with the big footballing occasions and the Test Match being on too.

Why on earth is the software so flakey - for it to happen once is acceptable, but for it to go wrong so often smacks of a poorly designed system!

Why they can't have a Cover-It-Live style backup I've no idea.

Three events have gone uncovered today (may as well be uncovered - no-ones going to use a non-updating live text feed) - Playoff Final, Scottish Final, Heineken Cup Final, and possibly the Champions League Final

I don't like that www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho redirects to http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006q2x0 or that www.bbc.co.uk/thevoice redirects to http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00k96j4.

It looks ugly, even if the redirect URLs still exist to get you there.

They should implement vanity urls as quickly as poss for all sites. They could be in the format of:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/eastenders

Who cares?

Me, a user. No idea why they're abandoning the whole concept of a URL.

For instance, Ian Beale's character profile. What's the link? It's http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006m86d/profiles/ian-beale. Why on earth can't that b006m86d bit just be the programme's name?

From a search engine's perspective as well as anything else. It's just logical. It also feels automated and cheap.

Comments 6 to 9 on this blog post from 2009: http://blog.jonudell.net/2009/08/31/the-joy-of-webscale-identifiers/ explain exactly why they didn't go down the route of using programme names in /programmes URLs.

Read it. Makes sense. One way of doing it.

Still think they were wrong.

So did the author of that blog post. I think the last sentence sums it up perfectly.

Another old blog on the same subject: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/radiolabs/2007/11/urls.shtml

Personally I think they've got it right. Remember, /programmes is a record of everything the BBC broadcasts - and once it's been broadcast the page stays up permanently. So if they had started using programmes titles instead of codes, the URL for The Voice, for example, would have rather awkwardly have to have been http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/thevoice1, because there's already been a programme called The Voice - a one-off documentary on BBC Four in 2008: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b008s99k

And if you're using programme titles for the main URL, what about series and episodes? Going down the route of programme/series/episode (like Channel 4 have done) can get messy because lots of programmes don't fit into that format. Using codes allows for much more flexibility.

Anyway visitors to the EastEnders website will be looking at the content on the site, not the URLs, and most of them won't notice or care that the URL has changed.

Actually, the URL would be /thevoiceuk because that's the actual name of the show