Building my rebooted:bbc.co.uk homepage - #15: BBC Today
BBC Today isn't the right title for it - but this is the area of the page where I would display the user's local weather, their local traffic news, and some topical editorial content.
I wouldn't change much about the current weather display on the homepage, except to remove the map - as various people have pointed out in comments on this blog, it is actually the weather icons that are of interest to the user, not that Sheffield is still vaguely in the same place in the UK. I did very much like the idea in the entry ---stream--- of a user's weather photo going into the space the map currently occupies.
For travel alerts the user would need to supply some kind of location information, and perhaps some information on the mode of transport that interests them. I don't have a car for example, so I'm only interested in news about the roads if it is going to impact on the local buses. When I lived in London I used to commute using the Central Line and the Victoria Line, so I'd want to know if they were up the spout.
Thinking of partnership opportunites, again there is a chance here for the BBC to collaborate with other providers of this type of information - I apologise for being London-centric, but perhaps the BBC could incorporate data supplied directly from the TfL site for example. In any case, I'd imagine the travel news section to be displayed as a ticker - you'd hope that most of the time it would say "No reported problems", but when there was lots of travel information you'd want it all.
Finally I would include some editorial content. I don't think it is the most important thing on the page, but it does give the page a feel of being current - as I've mentioned before, at Christmas I expect to see something Christmas-y there and so forth. My page doesn't have much that conveys topical relevence to what is going on around the UK outside of what is making the news headlines. Although I don't think my ex-colleagues on the homepage will thank me for the even more restricted character count I've given them in the space!
- 19 May 2006 16:23
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