New look for BBC News coming soon

Even the smallest of changes to a high profile website can be a big deal, especially when that website is owned by the BBC – then any change can lead to high praise and rabbid hatred – often within the same comment thread.

When the site you’re changing is the BBC News website, one of the most loved sites on the web, those little changes become even more contentious.

Changes to the BBC News website have usually come in the form of evolution, a tweak to structure, a change of banner image, an increase in width – small changes that have gradually improved the site a little bit at a time over the 13 years of the sites existence.

So, with the BBC News site editor, Steven Herrmann describing the next big relaunch as: “This has led us to the biggest rethink of the design of the site since 2003″, there can’t be many finger nails left on the hands of the News Interactive designers.

You can see a preview of the new look site in the BBC News gallery and I’ve got a few screenshots I’ve grabbed myself to illustrate this post.

The new look site includes an updated design giving journalists more space to play with when publishing stories and the homepage having more room to display those stories.

Video and images are more prominent on the site with big video and lots of images across the front page.

They also now highlight the big stories of the day, show you the newest stories and make it easier to share the stories you like most.

The BBC gets a fair amount of its traffic from social media sites with Facebook dominating that drive.

Now the site makes it easier for people to share the stories they like – in much the same way the new look iPlayer makes it easier to share – there’s a recommend button at the bottom of every story so you can post it straight to Facebook.

There are also icons to show if something is audio/video and a ‘new’ graphic that will sit next to text links to show a recently composed story.

Alongside the new look BBC News site there is also a new version of the Content Production System BBC journalists use to publish stories to the website. It’s easier to use than before which helps.

I’ve been spending a little time playing with the new look BBC News website as it’s been made available to people within the BBC network (these opinions are all mine and not the BBCs) and I’m seriously impressed.

Ok so my first reaction was a Simpsons-esq “waaaaaatttt!” but I soon got over it and started to see the benefits.

There were still a few issues that will clearly get resolved over time as the new site is phased in over the next week or two but on the surface, accepting its beta state – it looks great and is MUCH MUCH easier to find your way around.

Although there is a LOT more going on when you first visit – bigger pictures, more options, a heavier page – it feels less cluttered.

The new site is actually exactly the same width as the old site – the difference is in the placing of the menu.

Instead of having a main menu on the left hand side it’s moved across the top – making use of dropdowns to aid in navigation.

The only problem I can see at the moment is that story pages don’t seem to be making full use of the available space – text doesn’t spread out to fill the extra screen real estate and the quote boxes feel a bit weird all big and pushed off to one side – half indenting the text.

But it might simply be that’s a problem that will solve itself as stories are written and published straight to the new templates – I get the impression the site I’m seeing is BBC News-old stories put into BBC News-new templates.

An example of an ill fit – and I’ve suffered this on the blog as I look up older posts written with pictures for a smaller template – is the wide picture that once filled the available ‘text area’ now sitting off to the left.

The current wide image is 466 pixels across – the new site looks like it could handle 620 pixels – but again it might be a design decision to have a large ‘white space’ buffer between the text and the sidebar.

With all changes it will take people a while to get used to it, but eventually it will become second nature and we’ll look back at the older stories and laugh at how old fashioned they look.

The new news online site is fresh, open and easy to navigate and with the promise of alternatives to flash for video in the pipeline – closer to brilliant than any version yet.