The other BBC Homepage?

March 17, 2008

I wrote a few days ago in my Photo Blog about the BBC Homepage and more specifically about it’s emergency version. It had to switch due to heavy traffic.

Well the emergency version has now been talked about on the BBC Internet Blog including a link to the screen grab I took (above). It talks about the reason being due to a heavy traffic story and the need to reduce the load of the page to better handle high traffic periods.

But looking back at it and reading some of the comments on the post I started thinking - should there be a permanent low bandwidth version of the page?

When it was originally talked about on the BBC Internet Blog the BBC Homepage came under a LOT of critisism from a number of users who prefered things Pushed at them.

In fact - despite being nearly three weeks old the Homepage Goes Live article is till listed as one of the ‘currently being talked about’ stories on the right hand side of the BBC Internet Blog (from now on known as BIG).

I’m a big fan of the new homepage - it looks great and works really well. Until this new version of the homepage went live my personal homepage was whatever website I was working on at the time - at home this blog and at work bbc.co.uk/jersey

Since the new BBC Homepage went live I’ve had that as my homepage at home and at work - all it needs now is another two boxes - one for my own feeds and another for my own links but I’m not sure that will ever happen.

I’m not sure why so many people have a problem with the new homepage - it could be that they haven’t worked out, or don’t want to spend time customizing it or it could be that they don’t like customizable things - either way a lot of people seem to dislike it very much.

I have experience of that. I was pontificating on the wonder of the new homepage and how it’s made my life so much easier when a colleague told me they thought it was rubbish.

After many shout of indignation (all from me) I eventually worked out that it was because he hadn’t bothered spending any time customizing it. When I used his machine and login to set it up the same way I use it (screen grab below) he joined me in pontificating to the rest of the office.

If you’re prepared to put in the time to get everything positioned the way you like it the new BBC Homepage is a wonderful thing. Although I would prefer the BBC promo space to be slightly smaller.

However, no matter how hard you try to explain the ease of setting it to your taste, there seem to be a lot of people that don’t want to customize at all - they want things pushed at them instead of having the option to pull it out - so how about a ‘low weight’ option being available.

When you go to settings there should be the the option of switching to a non-interactive edition a bit like the emergency version shown in the screengrab - a cross between the old bbc.co.uk and the new bbc.co.uk but with less flashy stuff.