paul walk’s weblog

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!

Tags: BBC, nostalgia

At the JISC conference earlier this week Tom Loosemore of the BBC gave a talk entitled “The BBC’s 15 Web Principles”. JISC have made available a summary of the talk and the MS PowerPoint presentation that accompanied it. I wasn’t there unfortunately, but it has made an impression in the HE community already.

Some of the 15 principles are straightforward, others less so. I found number 5, “Treat the entire web as a creative canvas” interesting. Rather than just talking about mash-ups, Tom cites the example of ABC and its television show Lost. While ABC did build a website to accompany the show, they also invested resources in ‘competing’ websites such as LostPedia.

Tom also points to the ‘Accessible UK Train Timetables’ which I blogged about a couple of weeks ago as a good example of accessible design.

Anyway, a good summary of what it takes to provide a world-class website.

Technorati Tags: BBC, BBC 2.0, JISC, Tom Loosemore, web design