The folks at the BBC have updated their website. Although changes to the familiar always feel a little strange, I can’t help but feel that this new design doesn’t work as well as the previous one. The main gripe I have with it is the faded mush of a blue colour the main text of the website appears in. This is a characteristic of websites these days (including this very blog) – the sacrifice of readability for aesthetics. The grey blue may be easier on the eyes, but this is a news website, not a wallpaper!
I want headlines to jump out at me, and if I’m reading, I want the most legible font possible. The website is also a little wider than it used to be; personally, I think it’s not a big deal, but at the same time, narrower columns also aid readability. Everything is a lot more spaced out, another design mistake in my view. You used to be able to see most of the page without scrolling, but now you’re having to scroll down quite significantly to reach the bottom of the page. Most dramatically, the main page gives a range of headlines from around the world, but now scrolling is required to get to those.
Opera’s zoom function works pretty much perfectly to scale up font sizes and images, and increasing the font size on other browsers works okay to aid readability. Hence the base font size, in my opinion, should be small, so as to give as much information as possible.
The faded colours throughout don’t really represent a sense of sharp, accurate news reporting in my view. Just my first impressions of course, but in the news ticker, you can see a remnant of the way things used to be – vivid and punchy, just like the news ought to be.
