New TV site for BBC.co.uk

A couple of weeks ago the BBC launched a new version of the TV portal page at bbc.co.uk/tv. I didn't write about it at the time because I was rather too involved in making sure it got out of the door on time - which was quite a tight squeeze in the end.

The old page had a very traditional BBC approach to a portal page - there was a little bit of everything, and equal weight given to all the channels, regardless of whether it was the flagship BBC One or the digital channel BBC Parliament which can only be seen ¼ size on Freeview.

The new page has a much more striking design that focuses on one main "billboard" promotion, with is done using Flash. With the increasing amount of multimedia A/V content available at bbc.co.uk, and initiatives like the iMP trial and the promised "MyBBCplayer (working title)", the emphasis has been to shift the page from being a place where the audience found out about what is on television, to one where the audience can watch and experience television.

Although we use Flash across the BBC site for things like games, interactive maps, and on the homepages of some of the more magazine type areas like the Food homepage, up until now we have shied away from using it on our major portal pages, and certainly never before on a page linked to from the global navigation toolbar. This has partly been due to reasons of accessibility and download size, partly due to a lack of in-house skills to produce Flash movies, and partly due to a religious intolerance of Flash as a technology by a significant proportion of our production staff ;-)

To be frank the new page bends several of our standards and guidelines, most notably on the page weight we allow for a page that appears when you use a bbc.co.uk/foo top-level domain name. This has been quite a difficult issue. My take on it has been that since the content linked to from the page is almost exclusively multimedia content that requires broadband to experience it properly, and that the broadband content is UK restricted, and that more than 50% of internet connections in the UK are now broadband, we can use it to try and gauge what the audience reaction to heavier pages on BBC.co.uk is.

(That reminds me, if we don't have a quirky web easter egg at bbc.co.uk/foo, we should have)

I've been very impressed with the way the page has been built and coded. For some time now there has been a strong lobby group within our technology and production teams to move away from our rigid <TABLE> based layout into more of a CSS approach. We are hampered in this in two respects, that our browser support standards include some of the browsers that handle CSS less than helpfully, and that our global template infrastructure virtually imposes tables on the page.

With the /tv portal the client-side developer^* has done a fantastic job of pulling as much as possible of the presentation into the CSS, and coding the HTML semantically. This isn't just to show it can be done within our existing systems (although that is a bonus), but with a hefty Flash movie in the middle of the page saving every other available bit of bandwidth is well worth the effort.

Of course this does have some disadvantages - for example when a hack like me says to the editorial team "oh, it will be easy to turn that image into a link" without realising that the <a> tag is going to inherit all sorts of weird and wonderful positioning styling and a little chevron in front of it indicating it is a link. Looks like my current HTML/CSS knowledge isn't going to cut it in this brave new world, which suggests I am due a visit to a bookshop.

As a project one of the things that has most pleased me has been the quality of the feedback we have had back from the audience. We of course get the email sent via the 'contact us' link on the TV page, and we also solicited comment on the Points of View bbc.co.uk topic. We got some very thoughtful responses on the message board, for example.

I'd rather not have "billboard" type adverts to be honest. I want to go and find the TV listings and details about particular programmes so I think that channel information should be given more prominence.

One user, morrisonjersey, wrote:

Just out of interest - will it always be so dark - it feels a bit like it's portraying BBC Channels as carying nothing but doom & gloom when that really isn't the case.

To illustrate their point they mocked up their own lighter version and linked to it from a BBC message board - you can see it at http://www.upyourego.com/images/bbc_tv_portal.jpg.

The nicest thing about that is that I remember my first online introduction to Tom Coates came in 2001 when within a couple of days of launch he critiqued a redesign of the BBC's site search. At the time Tom had no way of publishing that critique on bbc.co.uk and including a direct link back to plasticbag.org. Now, due to the way we have relaxed our moderation and linking policy since 2001, morrisonjersey could go onto bbc.co.uk and say "I've modified your page" and link straight to his/her alternative version.

Mostly though I am just relieved that the /tv launch (almost) went totally according to plan. In the last couple of years my team and I have launched a lot of back-end applications, system updates, feature releases and bug-fixes, sometimes where the main goal has been for the end user not to even notice that we have changed the production process. So there is nothing like launching a public-facing redesign with a fixed deadline to quicken the pulse.

^*Anonymous because I'm not aware whether their web presence has previously outed themselves as a practising beeboid.