All white on the Beeb

I’m not going to write about the content of the series, or even the series itself at the moment - but as it’s the first big brand show to launch since the move to the new wide format on bbc.co.uk (excluding BBC THREE which is another post all to itself). I felt I’d write a few words about the new BBC White series section of the Beeb website.

A little background is probably useful to get things started - White is the new series from the BBC that looks at .. well white working class Britain.

The adverts across BBC Radio and television have all been voiced by Billy Bragg and feature the singer performing his own, unique, version of Jerusalem.

Incidentally - one of the more interesting versions I’ve heard of Jerusalem in a while was by Reverend and the Makers and was performed on the Culture Show on BBC TWO earlier in the year.

There will be a series of shows on BBC TWO starting on 7 March with Last Orders and finishing on 14 March with All White Barking. It’s basically a series of features about White British people.

These include one that sees the members of a Working Men’s Club in Bradford speak out. Another explores the legacy of Enoch Powell’s controversial speech, then there’s a drama about a white working class family who move into a Muslim area and an entertaining look at the impact of immigration from Eastern Europe.

Anyway - on to the design

The first thing that comes to my attention is the continued death of the grey navigation bar that is atop every other bbc.co.uk section - from news to nature.





It has moved to the new look and much more attractive Black Bar - this is the BBC logo on the left with the words Text Only and Accessibility above it and a search box on the right.





The second is the new, wide, 1024 format - the old BBC pages used to fill the first 800 pixels or so from the left hand side of the screen with, more often than not a set menu down the left hand side and a search box in the menu bar.

The new look format is around 1024 pixels wide and is centre aligned. I personally prefer this as centre aligned pages sit better on a larger monitor and make the page easier to read.





The new look pages also seem to focus on a major central feature that fills the whole width of the site - in this case it’s a large image on the left and video clip on the right.

Moving your mouse over the items underneath changes the image shown on the banner above - it’s a fairly straight forward rollover effect but it works pretty well.

Underneath this there are three boxes - one for video nation which takes you out to another BBC site, a site in the older templates that now look tired and dates - one for the BBC Archive which is within the White template and a box of related links.





The inclusion of the BBC Archive is really interesting - it seems that the Archive is only rolled out for big projects, the last one being the Pakistan season.

It makes sense as it allows the BBC more control over the content, the use and the bandwidth bills but it’s also slightly annoying that it can’t still be accessed much after the season is over.

The archive template is slightly different as it features a yellow strip across the top that’s in keeping with the main BBC Archive template as seen on other Archive projects.





The actual videos are encoded for flash and displayed through a similar player to the one used for the iPlayer and Torchwood website. You have the main video on the left and related links on the right. Under the video you have related information including a cast list.





Ok so that’s the archive - lets move away from there and towards teh feature pages themselves. This is the first site in the new design where we’ve got to see how sidebar navigation is handled - and it’s pretty much the same as with older pages.





It’s basically a list of links down the left hand side to each of the sub-sections within the White site - the link is indented when you are on that page.

There is a video in the middle of the page, comments underneath the video and related information on the right hand side.

So now we can move away from the White site and look at the other BBC pages that have gone wide so far - basically any new site built or commissioned in the last month or so.

The first site to go wide like this was the Lily Allen site (the BBC Homepage has only JUST gone live - the Beta doesn’t count) and, although it’s promoting a god awful show - the website is pretty good looking.





The second to go live was the BBC Homepage in its all new format - if you count the beta it was the first but we don’t count betas we count lives and this went live a few days ago.





Then there is the iPlayer - this started life as a normal narrow page - although centre aligned and without the grey bar but has since evolved and now includes other sidebar objects to make it wider.





Of course there could be other pages that have already gone wide that I haven’t noticed and there are other sites on bbc.co.uk that don’t fit the normal template structure.

One example of this is the Nature of Britain website - that was a flexible width site that defied all other BBC design rules - well not defied rules as such - more ignored style.





I’m pretty impressed with the nature site - aside from housing some stunning video - it’s also a really attractive piece of design and impressive use of map based navigation.

In fact there’s some pretty impressive design and navigation stuff coming out from across Science and Nature - Horizon is another good example of trying something different.

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