Reboot bbc.co.uk

Something Beautiful

Slavusha

To make a design of a home page first of all you should dream a bit and try to predict what the BBC site of the next generation will comprise. Starting from what is known about BBC's New Media strategy and also following your own suppositions concerning what is good and what is bad for the BBC (when you’ll have such a chance to talk about such things more or less scrupulously).

I suggest the following major tasks that the BBC faces with:

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  To preserve the existing BBC audience that visit BBC sites and surfs over the content that you can rely on.
  
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  To combine the already existing technologies and ways of presenting the information with what we used to call Web 2.0.
  
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  To integrate smoothly into new conditions and forms of the existing web huge array of high-quality content being then and now created by BBC editors.
  
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  To create services meeting the demands of the present time and make a tight integration both between with them and also with the existing traditional services.
  
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  To provide a simple and convenient interface to the easily access both of the existing content and to create and share users’ data.
  

In practice, the major and prospective on-line BBC services will be transformed into the following:

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  The already existing educational, entertaining and other sites should be closer to the people without prejudice as far as to the quality of information is concerned. I think I believe it would be logical to complement them with the editors and journalists blogs of of these sites, both individual and shared. Probably there is a sense It might be reasonable to invite volunteer bloggers experts in the mentioned subjects. It may be realized by way of personal invitations to such blogs. Actually, don’t you think it will be bad (I believe it would be good) if that very professor whose course was finished (closed?) by the site editor will make his entries to the blog on the BBC History site from time to time? Moreover, common users will have an opportunity possibility to post their comments.
  
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  I have no idea what is iMP. There is no information regarding it, except one screenshot I've find. If it is such a small new window that looks like Windows Media Player we would better do this differently. Definitely, there is certain meaning to to download the playlist simultaneously looks rather logically, to use momentary search, and everything the rest etc. the AJAX and MM Flash technologies provide us with (similar to that everywhere throughout the site). Such buttons as "Play", "Pause" and others are essential.
  
  
  But, I believe they should not be similar to those on the screenshot. For them it will be enough for it just to function — but in the same browser window it was called up, with those very links at the top of the page, with that very search toolbox, with that very look as usual web page. After all, multimedia in the web is no more something new. It is not a stress and a wonder for which you should open a new window, supply it with solid big buttons to understand that the music is breaking out just now!
  
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  The Internet is very big, and regrettably the search engines are only robots. Despite of the site ranking criteria, (while the major criteria for their operation is our desire that the results of each search should be better...) they are founded on we wish the results to be better from the point of view of their humanization.
  
  
  Meanwhile, regarding the category of artistic photography I would prefer to see link to Helmut Newton’s site on the very first page. It might be regardless of how good the web-master has optimized this site it under this or that searching machine. In my view the catalogue of the sites that it is necessary to regenerate (or it is only me am I alone who couldn’t find it?). As far as I remember once it was there.
  
  
  It could be looks logically enough that the BBC Directory or at least what concerns the cataloguing and sorting the information should be continued and extended. It might be possible to reflect the BBC sites at the top, if the BBC has sites that require the given category. Of course, this is not the Web 2.0. This radically contradicts to the ideology of the Web 2.0. But this is the BBC.
  
  
  There should be sites in the Catalogue that are looked through (reviewed) and provided with annotations of the editors or volunteers of that very "first circle", whom you can get in only owing to the personal invitation of the editors. Oh, Well, but who prevents from providing the description of the sites with tags? And, here we are again making Web 2.0!
  
  
  Most likely, that the existing content will be also provided by way of tags. Isn’t it? And by the way, according to the user’s choice the BBC Directory can be shown not only in the form of systematic catalogue but also like "clouds" similar to the tags on Web 2.0 sites.
  
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  So, for saving to preserve the succession of what is now "A-Z Index", it should be transformed into tags. This would be logical and it would take less time to get used to the new titles of the same services of content indexing.
  
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  0. Subsequent to that we need an interface to create, share, change look of the user's content. Most probably, the basic number of services have to look approximately like the following, starting from "Your BBC's-":
  
• "Profile" is the personal users’ information
• "Tags" is a a set of key words that describe interests of the current user. If it is full, it can be used for automatic personal ranging, being displayed on this or that information page.
• "Groups" as a service is the next logical continuation of "The BBC Directory" and "The Catalogue" with greater qualifying split of information according to the interests. There are those groups in the user’s profile which user takes part in, or those groups which user has created. Of course, group creator will have an access to the interface for the adding and changing the tags that will describe its content. All users can make groups within the limits of the existing categories of "The Catalogue". All members of the group write down to the general blog, that can consist of (may comprise) private blogs. Other users write down their comments.
• "Bookmarks" the place for online links storage. For sure, links are automatically rated according to the number of clicks and/or to the number of their mentioning in general users' links base. The user can be also shown "Popular links", — based on the statistics of their entering to the bookmarks by other users/number of clicks in addition to those links that he/she entered in the list himself/herself. Otherwise, "It Can Be Interesting For You", that is based on the tag correspondence describing the links to the users' tag.
• "Friends" is the list of the people whose personality this given very user is interested in. Most popular personalities of the portal can be represented additionally by offering to add them to "Friends".
• The "Multimedia Box" or the "Playlist" is a collection of links on the audio- and video-podcasts. Evidently, it also has a sense to announce most popular rolls and those that mostly correspond to the users' interests.
• "Surf History" is the log to advance the user through the BBC sites
• "Recent Searches" - no comments :)
• "Feeds" is the user’s personal adapted page, mixed with the blog posts of another users, including translation of RSS feeds from the other popular blog-sites, such as LiveJournal
• "Page" is the user’s personal adapted page mixed with the above mentioned content. Its necessity is a moot point but…
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  Search Engine. I would not like to look like a fan of the "It-Which-Must-Not-Be-Named" fruit company… But, what can prevent us from leaving on each page a one text input entry field? IMHO, we don't need "ok" or "search" buttons. "Enter" button on the keyboard is closer to the letter keys than the mouse.
  
  
  On the page with search results, somewhere on the top we can type 5 (7, 9,12) from that site where the search was initiated. Then, below we can type top 5 from "Catalogue", then top 5 from "iMP", other BBC sites, blogs, the Internet and from other places, any way we like. One can make an experiment, with the possibility to further demonstrate all the results from each source. AJAX will be to the point here, especially for the search in what is already found.
  
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  And, of course we will put links to the RSS Feeds wherever it is possible.
  
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  Nothing special but has just come up to my mind. Such sites as http://www.thefwa.com/ give us many examples of playing the multimedia Internet. Some things should be used on the sites of TV and radio channels, as well as educational sites.
  

And at last, we smoothly move to the home page. Though the fashion on total adjustment of all and everything sank into the oblivion, but we can and must adjust a little bit with common sense, only that one which needs the adjustment. To be exact:

• "Default" profile is to display all of the great BBC content in small pieces and all of the user's activities.
• "Newspaper" is to display much more political, regional, sport news; TV programs, information about the culture life, etc. in the users' region.
• "Journal" is to display educational, etc. and of this sort content plus some information about cultural events in the place your residence area live.
• "Blogger" is intended for the people who lead active public life in the Internet often communicating with each other.
• "Multimedia" is intended for the people who are interested, first of all, in audio and video content items.
• "Search" is for those people who want to use the BBC site primarily as a search instrument.

It is evident that two layouts should be applied to each profile.

90 percents of the users have monitors with 1024*768 screen resolution, and higher. For them is the base "wide" layout.

Other 10 percents of the users have monitor with of 800*600 pixel resolution. Especially for them, and also for those whose monitors’ resolution wasn’t detected, we would employ the "narrow" layout. Moreover, we will do it in such a way that the graphics for different layouts should not be saved twice. We will provide an the opportunity to switch the layouts for both categories.

That's all at this time.

P. S. I've not so much time to create design, that will never been implemented. So I've finished and upload only the "Deffault" page. In the other hand, it's a very interesting task. I'd like to improve the rest of the pages, if it needed, as soon as possible.

• 26 May 2006 15:53