I’m sorry I don’t like the BBC Beta

When the BBC first released the beta version of the new BBC homepage a couple of weeks ago I was initially disappointed. On first impressions it just didn’t seem a radical enough change and some parts just didn’t look balanced anymore with odd padding’s and margins. All this plus the clock was gone, sure it served little purpose but I loved the retroness of it. Sure the BBC gave a suitable response describing the changes they had put in place but this hadn’t answered my concerns. Something simply wasn’t right.

But now I’ve figured it out, they promised me so much more.

Back in February the BBC released a blog post titled ‘A new global visual language for the BBC’s digital services‘. It describes how the BBC has developed it website over recent years and how they’re now developing a new visual style for the BBC website, going as far as to preview some stuff too.

Simply put at the time I loved the stuff I was seeing and the changes they were making. Although only showing small parts of this new visual style it appeared to be the BBC was moving away from the Web 2.0 trend. Now they appear to be making design choices that I feel more accurately portray how the BBC should look.

Then came along the new BBC homepage to ruin all this; where was this new visual style we’d been shown? Instead it appears the new BBC homepage is simply a small update from the current design, possibly a .5 version before the new visual style is completed and rolled out. With this new visual style in the works and the seemingly small changes to the new design to me it seems like money would have been better spent not bothering and waiting.

In truth the new beta of the BBC homepage might not actually be that bad, it doesn’t look all that different from the current site which I came to accept, even like over time. The problem is they previewed something new and awesome and instead have given me something that just didn’t meet the high expectations I had after seeing the new visual style.