The BBC are ‘widgetising’ their home page see the beta here. It’s quite slick, with a liberal sprinkling of Ajax user-interface decoration. It introduces a greater degree of ‘personalisation’ and ‘localisation’.
When I visited the page, I duly entered my postcode, but I couldn’t really see a difference to the page after ‘localising’ it – except for the ‘weather widget’ which would be the first thing I’d remove any way if I started using this page for real….
They have introduced a blog about the development of the new homepage. Apparently:
This is the beginning of a conversation between the BBC and you about the homepage;
This is actually worth a glance if you’re interested in such development. I quite liked the fact that, along with talking about improved ’search’ etc., they list ‘nostalgia’ as an important design quality!
