The new homepage of thousands

Well now that everyone else has started talking about it, and you can see it yourself at certain times on a Monday – I figured I’d post a little more of the BBC Homepage and how some of the customisation will look (from someone that hasn’t worked on the page and isn’t on the team that did).

The best way to talk about something is to show it working – so I’ve put a few screen grabs together that show the bits of most interest to me and bits that are most different.

I haven’t included a screen grab of the grey navigation bar that is currently on EVERY BBC website as it isn’t there – the grey bar has been dropped from the homepage – as has the bbc.co.uk logo – replaced instead with the three blocks across the top.

Most of the new homepage can be changed and moved around – the bits that can’t (below the top navigation area) are the main promotional box (that controls the colours of the homepage).

As you can see from the animation above – clicking on one of the promo items (coloured boxes) will not only change the image and text in the box but will change the colour scheme of the whole page – I’m not sure I like that very much. I do like the idea of being able to set the colour scheme but I want to set it permanently – not based on the promo I’m viewing.

Although, changing the whole page does draw more attention to whats being promo’d and should help drive more people to whatever is in that space – thus making it MUCH more valuable.

Which should help given that the directory (currently on the left hand side of the screen) has been moved to the bottom of the page and put in a dark grey box (similar to some blogs I’ve seen).

Now back to the bits in the middle. Every block (apart from the promo space) can be changed, you can turn them off or on and even change whats contained within them.

You can have them all on

Or if you fancy it you can have them all off

But I don’t really see the point in having them all turned off as it looks a bit silly – unless you just want a simple BBC search engine – in which case I suppose it works.

The new BBC Homepage is a sort of Google Homepage come Page Flakes but just for BBC content – although I’m sure there is scope to increase that and open it up at a later date.

Two things that are clearly absent from the current beta release is localisation – being able to pull in stuff from your home town only extends to the Weather widget and elements of news but I think more is coming. The other is the iPlayer – there isn’t a mention of it or much in the way of A/V stuff. Given that the Radio Player becomes iPlayer Radio next week – I’m sure there will be more to come.

Anyway – this also brings blogs to the front of the BBC – there’s a fab range of blogs from really talented people across all areas of the Corporation and the new homepage makes it easier to find them.

And finally the clock – god how I love the clock. I hope this isn’t a short term thing, I hope the clock stays and isn’t a nostalgia trip to mark ten years of Aunty on the web.