bbc.co.uk

So this new Visual language seems to be very long term...

From the BBC Internet Blog...

Consistent user experience

In thinking through our design principles for each user environment, we give careful consideration to what the audience wants when they access the content: one BBC experience across different platforms and territories.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinternet/img/eh10.png

With this in mind, we have created a new design template for the site. This new user experience, created by the Future Media team in conjunction with creative direction from designer Neville Brody, will be integrated across the service in 2010-2011. It's a clean new design that introduces consistency of style, usability and accessibility.

iPlayer 3.0 BETA and social network integration on it's way too...

I quite like the red BBC News look, also like how the date is written next to the name for some reason.

It's about time they got rid of the sidebar based navigation system on BBC News'es site, they've been using it in some form or other since about 2000. (Or am I wrong about that)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/midlandstoday

One region migrated to the new sites.
Worth noting, the programme pages are to be the new region sites.

I hope they do a bit more work on the new programme pages before it's rolled out to the rest of the regions.

Hopefully the 'last on' section will eventually link to the actual episode, doing away with link currently in the featured section which links to a /mediaselector URL. Hopefully the last on section can handle more than one episodes to cope with regional news such as Look East which has two editions in the evening & night (ie. Cambridge & Norwich).
[Edit: I notice today's edition does have it's own page http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00rl4s8 so will be interesting to see if it show additional content later today.]

Having the regional news programmes stored on the /programmes site does appear to have resulted in the loss of the 'features' and 'in pictures' section (based on viewing current Look East site). Hopefully if each edition has it's own page then it will be possible to provide links to the news article mentioned & any related features, which will presumably be hosted on the various regional websites.

I guess it does help to reduce the number of 'top level' domains per announcement if /midlandstoday now points to /programmes/b006mj57 and the same will apply to other regions.

The whole reducing top level domain thing is really quite a clever wheeze at the right wing press moans. It looks like they're actually doing something about cutting the size of the site but in actual fact they're simply continuing on the rationalisation of the clunky old never updated pages into the auotmated systems that they've been devloping since the 2006 revamp.

Now if only they could get regional news on iPlayer properly...

Well the regional news is meant to be arriving on the iPlayer in the near future.

It is indeed, start of April, I believe.

Make that July ...

Similarly, I note that the BBC Local Radio websites are beginning to be more integrated into /programmes, ie the links at the top of the local websites, and on http://www.bbc.co.uk/england/radio/ now point to, for example, http://www.bbc.co.uk/surrey/programmes rather than http://news.bbc.co.uk/local/surrey/hi/tv_and_radio/ as was previously the case, although the latter page still exists. And in the case of BBC Surrey and BBC Sussex at least, the presenter profiles have been added to their homepages on the programmes site.

Low Graphics option set to go:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/sporteditors/2010/03/news_and_sport_low_graphics_sw.html

Odd problem with http://beta.bbc.co.uk/

Sometimes the "Media Zone" bar at the top doesn't load. Other times it does.

It looks much better without the Media Zone bar - a shame they don't have an option in the Customise area to hide it completely.