If it ain’t broke, break it.
The BBC, in their never ending quest to be trendy have decided to change their homepage. They’ve developed something of the NASA syndrome* and gone for clicky/slidey widgets everywhere. They have also increased the width of the rendered page to approximately fit 1024 wide displays.
Now, each of the widgets on the page requires a pretty hefty chunk of processing power to render, my E6750 dual core desktop doesn’t notice but my Nokia N800 certainly does. Loading the BBC webpage on the internet tablet takes about 17-20 seconds while each widget unit is rendered. Once rendered, any state-change in a widget (a ‘reveal’ for example) takes a further 5-6 seconds.
To add insult to injury, the ‘New BBC Homepage’ is just a facade over the old site, click on any news item or department link (after slogging your way through the cripplingly slow main homepage on your mobile device) and you’ll be presented with the old webpages. The only other option is to use the ‘mobile/pdas’ link which is in itself, a content-crippled portal to the BBC site.
The TV licence in the UK now costs a staggering £135.50 a year for which you now get very little intelligent programming. I find that I watch about 20-30 minutes of television in an entire week, the only channel of any real factual value seems to be BBC parliament which is nothing more than a relay of proceedings.
I had enjoyed the BBC website and BBC News in particular but the inexorable decline of the journalistic standards has, over the years, diminished it’s value for me. The new homepage system has pretty much removed all remaining value by making the site at best uncomfortable to use and at worst inaccessible from the now common mobile devices.
As a British citizen, it is unfortunate that the BBC now fails to provide me with any useful service.
*At least on nasa.gov with the N800, the site fails over gracefully and allows you to quickly and easily reach the existing, still high quality factual content.
Tags: bbc, broken, licence fee, mobile, new homepage, new webpage, pda, tv tax
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For me the BBC offers two things - the website and Radio 4 (the latter still a bit of a gem). I’m told that BBC 4 has good things on it but I can’t get digitial where I live so I don’t know (and I also hear that it has so small an audience it may be abandonned).
I’ve given up on the “official” BBC homepage now - I bookmark into a favourite page and use that. There is the World Service (radio) but that is directly paid for by the government I understand.
I agree with you 100% as for the “new” homepage it smacks of a web 2.0 facebookish wanttobe not good.