BBC beta c or d?

why do people like the clock? it's totally pointless. otherwise i like.

What's wrong with pointless? I like it too. Reminds me of the old BBC clock before the news, which is maybe the point?

I like the colour but i'm not sure about the font. And do i need a link to CBeebies?

Reminds me of the old BBC clock before the news

All that's missing is the globe going round...

Everything seemed a bit too 'big' and clunky, but I did like the clock too.

The point is its infinite customizability - you can choose the colour/font/whether or not to have cbeebies or sport or whatever. I hate it!

It's like post-myspace web design :(

why do see the choice/customizability as bad? they've done it quite well

the positive reactions to the clock (to the extent where it's the most noticeable thing/seen as most noteworthy thing) are quite fascinating to me.

you can choose the colour/font/whether or not to have cbeebies or sport or whatever

How do you do the fonts?
I've got rid of the cbeebies and sport.

What is the point of the big picture? If you click on the words underneath you get different coloured pages but that seems to be about it.

bearing in mind working on something like this would be a dream job for me (xp)

xp

OK, I see 'display options'!

It's cos the clock is well animated, complete with dampeners and everything. You can imagine it ticking.

Not played with it yet, but yeh, I like the design so far. I might get better/worse the more I play.

I actually think Facebook does this kind of modular design a bit more elegantly. I know it's a beta, but it feels very clunky to me.

Another thing I like is the photo changing when you move your cursor over the different stories. As for the clock, blueski, I guess I like the analogue nature of it in a hi-tech context.

http://www.tvradiobits.co.uk/idents/BBC1clock68.jpg
xp

Nice, Ned

if i could delete the clock i would. i don't need tokenist retro-charm on a homepage that's otherwise representing the modern.

I actually think Facebook does this kind of modular design a bit more elegantly.

maybe but facebook look is quite dismal and this creates a wild balance once people have added SuperWall and all the other shite

also Facebook needs to be as wide as this

I don't mind the clock but I hate the way they have squashed it in amid all that navigation text : (

We're not actively seeking feedback about the Homepage Beta at present
If you have a question, please read our FAQ below which you may find helpful.

To send a comment or question about the BBC website, please visit the bbc.co.uk Feedback page. To make a general comment about the BBC, please visit our About the BBC website.

Thank you to everyone who has taken the time to send us their feedback about Homepage Beta. We've made a few improvements already and are now taking some time to review all your comments and suggestions and work out how best to incorporate these, as well as fixing bugs.

Here are some common points that were raised in your feedback:

The main promo area should be smaller, moveable and/or customisable
A greater degree of personalisation for the modules (eg. to have your own team's news in the sports box, or to select your preferred radio stations)
The text is too big and doesn't resize gracefully
The colour changes are distracting and unnecessary
Too much scrolling needed
You'd like to be able to switch between the retro clock and a digital equivalent

definitely agree with the scrolling too much, the whole page is far too vast. When you resize the text to smaller it doesn't change any of the spacing making it look ridic.

like the new weather symbols

it is quite overwhelming, at first anyway, and i'm not sure how keen i am on the tonal shading of everything. agree about the clock. analog always seems a bit friendlier.

and also, "Sex with dead model 'was wrong'", in case anyone was wondering.

confirmation at last

That murder case is probably the funniest in British legal history.

challenging opinion

rubbish on a small screen ie 800x600

xxpost
What, sex with a dead woman? You've got a strange idea of the funnies, Dom.

Anyway for laughs surely Mohammed Al-Fayed is firing on all cylinders at the moment.

rubbish on a small screen ie 800x600

what % of web users run that res now?

That murder case is probably the funniest in British legal history.

definately worth being ripped off for an episode of law & order

"I didn't kill a woman and sexually assault her still warm corpse. I was just going for a wander one day when I saw a woman not moving on the floor, and decided to have sex with her"

what % of web users run that res now? In 2007: 14% :0

one being me on my ageing work laptop that makes my eyes go funny at any higher res.

you resolution fascist.

"I didn't kill a woman and sexually assault her still warm corpse. I was just going for a wander one day when I saw a woman not moving on the floor, and decided to have sex with her"

Yeah, it is quite funny when you put it like that.

oh hang on, that whole being able to move the sections around is chuffing ace. i'm warming to it.

is that a quote from same article? hope not

LOLZ

As someone who has BBC News as their homepage anyway, I think this is great, I like being able to customise it like this. I don't particularly want my homepage to be pretty, I want it to be functional and this suits quite well.

But yeah, that's a nice clock.

i wish they'd update the news page, it's looked like shit for years

Guardian finally got round to that the other week

the only thing i don't like is that grey "customise" bar is ALWAYS THERE on VERY PRIME REAL ESTATE when presumably you'll use it like, two or three times ever?

News has nothing to do with this, they're a completely different team

btw:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/home/beta/object/clock/tiny.swf

the only thing i don't like is that grey "customise" bar is ALWAYS THERE on VERY PRIME REAL ESTATE when presumably you'll use it like, two or three times ever?

yeah i hate this too

OMG yes!
xp

Ooh it's just changed colour of its own volition (dispropotionate excitement on my part, I know)

please to tell me how to make that clock my desktop background kthxbye

print screen (unless you want it to still move)

can it be made into a dashboard widget?

yes it can but it's enormous. how do you edit these things?

^^^don't quote this out of context now

why not buy a real clock?

If the clock actually had the current real time on it from a decent source then it might be cool, as it just feeds back your system time at you, not so cool.

a real clock may not have that nice wobbling effect

all of the Vista clocks are shite too. I HATE TIME.

all of the Vista clocks are is shite too.

fixed lol

Not being able to move that big box on the RH side is annoying. I don't care about gardening.

Set flash to low quality for double the retro fun.

change your pc clock so it's a few minutes behind, for that classic 3.30pm schoolday vibe

just keep zooming in on the center bit for that pointless anti aliased circle kick

Set flash to low quality for double the retro fun

wow, it now seems like a real old clock!

right click print to waste a fuck load of toner.

> please to tell me how to make that clock my desktop background kthxbye

one of the Life On Mars screensavers was an old tv with that clock in it. only it didn't resize and just sat in the middle of big screens.

i like it, it has subtle bits to it like the bounce-back on the tick.

lots of places claim to be able to make swf into screensavers:
http://www.bytescout.com/swftoscreensaverscout.html
http://www.sharewareconnection.com/screenmx.htm
http://www.zb2000.com/flashsaver.htm
...

website uses JQuery, which is the new think.

print screen (unless you want it to still move)

-- blueski, Tuesday, 19 February 2008 16:08

DUH

xpost not a screensaver, a background - but thanks for those links anyway, they're aces :-)

all of the Vista clocks are shite too. I HATE TIME.

-- blueski, Tuesday, 19 February 2008 16:17 (48 minutes ago) Link

This was the first thing that went through my mind when i started up my new vista infected laptop.

it's live now (only just noticed)

how long til the templates for the rest of the site (news etc.) update?

hey wow guys look at that clock

the title bar is way too thick and you can't make it smaller and so half my screen becomes lots of thick blue bars saying "NEWS" "BLOGS" "WEATHER" with not a lot of actual easily readable contents.

actually it's that massive picture of something hatching from an egg that really blocks everything. i'm at work and don't always open my browser SUPER HUGE and this new thing is very unusable in this environment

the screen also freezes for 3 seconds when i load it before i can do anything

News may not be switching to the new layout for a good long time - they move at their own pace

the Lily Allen site, BBC Three, and iPlayer are all using the new layout so far, and all new sites are supposed to be using it

javascript geeks may be interested in this - http://www.bbc.co.uk/glow/

Page Unauthorized

Unfortunately the following page was not available:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/glow

username tracer
password Hand1

THE CLOCK KNOWS WHERE I LIVE

THE INTERNET IS COMING FROM INSIDE THE INTERNET

argh sorry d00ds. can you see this?

http://alice.welcomebackstage.com/blog/2008/03/04/glow-030-released/

noooo

nope

not sure i want to with a url like that. 8)

anyone else having problems clicking on the sub-headings on the main page today? ie clicking on 'News' or 'Weather' seems to activate the window instead of going to the news homepage.

dickeads.

Is it just me who thinks the new look BBC News site is bad?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/theeditors/2008/03/refreshing_changes.html

What don't you like about it? I think it's a huge improvement!

Looks okay to me, plus I can barely see that much difference anyway

spacer gifs in 2008, for a start

Too much white space, too much scrolling involved. I like being able to see as much as possible on the news and sport sites.

I refresh BBC Sport about once every five minutes so things like this matter to me.

Yeah, I'm pretty displeased with this. The last layout was so good that a banner tidy-up would have done.

OH i was looking at the wrong thing, Yeah the need to scroll is totally annoying.

http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/shared/img/o.gif

more like

http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/shared/img/O_o.gif

You know, that's quite a clock!

pleased about the extra width altho the right side column seems to occupy too much of that - text captions are not long enough for the pictures they sit with. left side menu too grey, not enough bold text - looks like they've played safe and deliberately toned things down so as not to 'shock' users more.

why don't they retain the clock on the News page tho?

the search bar at the top doesn't have a 'search News section only' option or similar - maybe it should?

Haha I didn't realize they were using spacer gifs. God what feebs.

The inconsistencies between this and the regular BBC homepage are down to the news people not giving two shits about what the rest of the BBC does with its pages. They pretty much ignore whatever doesn't originate in their own shop.

Too much space. Old design is information rich without being overpowering:
http://i50.photobucket.com/albums/f325/caek/Picture3-1.png

New design has about half as many words and fewer stories in the same area:
http://i50.photobucket.com/albums/f325/caek/Picture2-2.png

Also, they're giving too much prominence to video content, particularly on the sport page.

And yes, sure, 95% of us have displays that are >1024px now. Also, most of us have windowed graphical user interfaces that allow us to resize those windows so we can have see several things on the screen at once at a glance.

Sport is a different deal. There's definitely too much white space there.

I know what you're saying about the old one packing more information in, but there's a limit to how much you can pack in before it becomes overload. If you're a devotee of that page you quickly learn how to ignore the clutter, but to me the old sport page you posted is overloaded with stuff. Sport in particular seems prone to this, since there are so many stories and teams and categories of news each day.

Not sure what you mean about giving too much prominence to video content - on the old site there were eight video links in the top third of the page!

My big complaint is that the text isn't black any more. No doubt there's some reason for this since every site seems to be moving away from black text but damn if I know what it is.

Screens should really be white on black anyway.

not if they're info heavy

At least the new Sky News effort makes the BBC's homepage look professional: http://beta.news.sky.com/skynews

ugh

yes

it looks eerily like the nypost's OLD, unsoftened home page (also owned by rupert murdoch)

it's just STOOPID.

http://web.archive.org/web/20030320105408/http://www.nypost.com/

Network Error (tcp_error)

A communication error occurred: ""
The Web Server may be down, too busy, or experiencing other problems preventing it from responding to requests. You may wish to try again at a later time.

For assistance, contact your network support team.

Doh.

Eh?

The Sky site was down for me all morning.

For those that like the clock:

http://625.uk.com/tv_logos/flash4.htm
http://625.uk.com/tv_logos/flash2.htm

never thought much about clock design generally before but interesting how many of those don't use numbers

i particularly felt nostalgic for the old school countdown clock, we used to sit in the hall and pretend to shoot the dots out. don't remember that atrocious music though.

The new weather beta is a lot better now.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/ is fucked up right now.

Like someone forgot to close a tag, or something.

anyone else getting a username and password box saying

"A username and password are being requested by http://www.bbc.co.uk. The site says: "Glow"

?

Aye, just clicking cancel takes you through to the site anyway.

yeah, it's the Glow part that bemuses me.

nice clock

has anyone been able to view the weather 'map' lately, for like the past couple of months its beem broken on both my works pc and home laptop. bbc u suk

Works fine on mine.

hmm, probly a plugin then. but it doesn't come up with anything to tell me which one it needs.

(and thanks!)

I had a few problem with it when they moved to the new one and I cursed it in a similar fashion to yourself (with added "why oh why did they change it when it worked before") but it's been fine for a while.

We are talking about the one on this page I presume?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/weather/

I find the new map slightly scary actually - the rain always looks like a flood...this is tomorrow at 12pm - light rain...

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3317/3485816968_7a7f5df7cb.jpg

xp yeah that one. i just get the 'due to technical problems' message instead of the map.

i right clicked and i checked i had flash installed, says i have.

okay i'm a stupid goose..

seems it now defaults to 'Atlantic' as a location.

i just changed it to british isles, and now it works

i apologise, for being anywhere near a computer.

hate the new weather page design, bring back the old symbols etc.

I know it's 2.30am but

Nameserver trace for www.bbc.co.uk:

* Looking for who is responsible for root zone and followed i.root-servers.net.
* Looking for who is responsible for uk and followed ns4.nic.uk.
* Looking for who is responsible for bbc.co.uk and followed ns1.thls.bbc.co.uk.

Nameservers for www.bbc.co.uk:

* ns1.thls.bbc.co.uk returned (SERVFAIL)
* ns1.bbc.co.uk returned (SERVFAIL)
* ns1.thdo.bbc.co.uk returned (SERVFAIL)
* ns1.rbsov.bbc.co.uk returned (SERVFAIL)

yeah just noticed it's not there

http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/news.bbc.co.uk

Still not working for me. Endtimes people.

what will i do without finding more people in afganistan have been bombed and irrelevant football gossip? ;_;

It's back up but very slow.

I bet it was Democracy Live that did for it.

it was one (1) router going down that did it o_O

should all be fixed now

New homepage with ADDED news tracking.
http://beta.bbc.co.uk/

that's "Topic Tracker" to you

also, no clock

Searching for 'Leicester' only seems to give me the choice to track 'Red Leicester'. I know not much goes on in my neck of the woods but that seems slightly narrow.

i agree it's not presented well - it seems like you ought to be able to craft whatever query you want and it should find it.

We know the homepage clock was popular, reminding us of a bygone era when people drank tea instead of frappuccino-latte-espressos.
I am still in this bygone era goddamnit

http://news.bbc.co.uk vs http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/ ?

I don't like all the different colours.

It's a complete mess and there's less information on the front page. What were they thinking?

looks good to me

except for this:

font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, sans-serif;

smdh ;_;

I like it. There's a bit less information but what's there is much easier to read. How is it a mess? You've got major news, then fluff, then sport -- and then features down the right. Drill into subsections using the top nav.

What I don't like is the big dark purple box of "My News" or whatever. Will anyone use that? Especially when you can't drag it into a more useful position?

The biggest "wha" to my mind is that it doesn't look anything like the design of www.bbc.co.uk - and doesn't make use of any of the user interface innovations there (editable categories, draggable areas, etc)

Also, it hadn't changed in approx 50000 years and was looking it.

I don't know the explanation about Helvetica Neue.. def seems kind of weird

gross

It feels awkwardly proportioned and a bit wonky - why is everything so big? Most of the links and information are well below the fold - why continue to hide sport all the way down there and not have a link at the top? Everything in that right hand column is way bigger than it needs to be. It just doesn't feel very usable, especially compared to the last one, like a website built out of Duplo.

I'll get used to it

how does a new military plane article come under Technology, but a new spy plane article come under Sci/Env ?

tee hee

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v134/tracerhand/domesticHP_05SEP2010_1336.jpg

I'm..... just... hmm

http://beta.bbc.co.uk/

I'm all for the the-updated-web-interface-that-you-find-confusing-and-ugly-and-annoying-now-is-one-to-which-you-will-soon-enough-become-accustomed mindset but that's shite

tbf it is really really hard to try to represent avenues into everything that lies behind www.bbc.co.uk

oh I'm sure

but whatever the solution, i don't think this is it. my eye really doesn't know where to go, the whole thing feels stressful and jangly

I've only just gotten used to the current one, this latest overhaul looks horrible. I particularly don't like the large arrows, and it feels like I can't leave my cursor anywhere for fear of java nonsense.

I'm gonna miss my "Weird and Wonderful" and "On This Day" widgets ;_;

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio1/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/1xtra/

GAAAHHHH HOW IS THIS HELPFUL

just pictures... squares

the design leaves something to be desired but i really like how it shows you what's just been played, and how you can rewind to like an hour ago or whatever

curious..... http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio1/index.shtml

rtc, shit yeah, it's so chaotic

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio1/help/homepage/feedback/

it makes sense now. at the weekend we loaded up iplayer on the playstation, and lo, it was this new 'beta' design.

was wondering what on earth was going on ..

suspect the whole use of space is designed for widescreen net ready tvs that will be bought in the run up to crimbo/olympics etc

think i read somewhere that it's something to do with optimisation for touchscreen tablets, hence all those boxes & sideways scrolling for flipping through

oh, of course .. that makes perfect sense now that you mention it.

http://beta.bbc.co.uk/radio4

speaking of widescreen swipey biz