New BBC Homepage

27 February 2008, 18:00

The BBC have launched their new homepage that has been in beta for the last few months - it looks and feels great. To get this out the door through the restrictive BBC standards and ancient infrastructure is one hell of an achievement. Good work.

However, the customisability of the page is completely knobbled by the lack of content and some basic persistence problems. The page lacks fundamental functionality that even the most basic Pageflakes-a-like customisable homepage has baked in.

For starters, the layout isn't saved in anything other than your cookie so I have to customise the page on every machine I use. This persistence problem gets even worse when you try and use other BBC systems. When I enter my postcode to customise the homepage, this information doesn't appear to be used to modify the content on any other site, and I still get asked for my postcode or place name elsewhere - /weather, /whereilive, and the customisable news homepage (a competing homepage... on the same site - only at the BBC!) for example.

The other problem is the lack of third-party content. Again, pretty much every other customisable homepage on the web allows you to develop widgets/gadgets/whatever that are dumped on the page in the positions you require. Gadgets are even going social now - with open specs like OpenSocial actively encouraging widget reuse across the web. Not so at the BBC, no external gadgets are allowed (not even basic external RSS feeds), and you can't repurpose the "gadgets" they use for use elsewhere.

Some of the content on the page seems a little pointless - I can't add stock quotes in the money section (even though the BBC has the content on the news site), and some blocks just consist of a link. The BBC's flagship iPlayer content is just a linked image to /iplayer - not very persuasive.

The upshot is that the design is great and it gives one of the UK's biggest sites a fresh feel, but all the space (and download time?) used by the customisation controls is wasted because the user can't make the page their own, like they are used to elsewhere. Don't even think about adding Sky's news, your mate's blogs, or anything more useful. Here is our news feed... Auntie knows best.

Jason Cartwright RSS Feed

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Jason is a web developer living in London, working for Google and Ferrago Ltd.

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