Pancentric Blogs

The BBC has gone and got all Web 2.0 and ‘AJAXy’ with their new beta home page design.

Announced on their blog last week, it uses the now tried and tested blend of gradient fills and large type as well as the drag and drop functionality of sites such as iGoogle, Facebook and Netvibes.

Initial impressions are good. It works very smoothly with only the odd display error here and there but hey, this is the beta launch. It utilises RSS and javascript to allow the user control over what content is displayed and where it sits on the page. There are a few things which would be nice to have and I’m sure they’re in development, judging by the number of blog comments highlighting these things.

Firstly, the ability to drag news categories around within a channel. When adding news feeds to the news panel they appear in the order in which the user adds them with no mechanism for reordering them. The only way is to remove all feeds and add them in the order in which you would like them to appear.

Secondly, the overriding colour on the page is dictated by the main hero panel selection. By swapping between the four options the entire page colour scheme changes. This is, though clever, overkill. Why should the colour of my news feed links be dictated by the fact that I’ve clicked to view the ‘Live Music’ tab on the hero panel?

All in all I think it’s a step in the right direction. Though they’re probably a year to 18 months, if not more, behind the curve as far as interaction design utilising these technologies is concerned. Aren’t the BBC meant to be blazing trails in this area having a roster of 21ish agencies and a development team of 20+ people to work on this one project?

One thing that really brought a smile to my face is the resurrection of the old-skool BBC analogue clock in the top right of the screen - a lovely touch.