What really jumps off the screen about the BBC’s website is its color scheme. It uses a dark red text and background color that’s kinda boring. Both boston.com and nytimes.com use blue schemes (or blue and black with the Times), but of the three sites, boston.com’s headlines pop the most. You look at the Globe’s website and you want to keep clicking. You look at the BBC’s website and you feel disinterested, maybe even turned off. It’s not ugly, it’s just not attractive. And the three-column format makes it look a little unprofessional, like a glorified WordPress site, not the website of the primary news and entertainment outlet in the UK.
I’m also not a fan of the BBC’s header bar. White text against a red background is far harder to read than dark text against a white or lighter background. The BBC’s header is also very small, and the different sections are compressed right up against the search window. Boston.com does it better, spreading out the header across the entire screen and making the section names big enough to be easily noticeable. NYTimes.com keeps the sections small and arranges them vertically along the left side. It’s harder to find initially than the BBC’s, but it’s more comprehensive.
Also, not a fan of bbc.co.uk’s centralizing the stock market stuff. Maybe England has a bigger investment culture than we do, but boston.com keeps the market recap at the bottom of the front page, and nytimes.com leaves it off entirely. Websites for the Miami Herald and Washington Post also leave the stock market off the homepage, and the Chicago Tribune keeps it in a lower corner. Even CNBC’s website, a television channel whose programming is almost entirely business-oriented, keeps the actual stock market in a corner, and it’s actually a smaller box than the BBC’s. If you don’t follow the stock market, seeing stock market figures can be very visually arresting. When it’s the first thing you see on a website, it makes you want to click off the page.
BBC’s website clearly wants to be seen as a “world news” website. The international news- whose headlines mention the US, Canada, Russia, Cuba, Pakistan and Iran- appears above the UK news, and directly under the “news” header. There’s also a “world service” section that offers news in foreign languages, and the “TV Channels” section mentions BBC affiliates in other countries, not just the UK. Sports has a more “British” feel to it, however: The Australian Open gets top headline, but the next bunch are all soccer, especially English Premier League.
My last impression of bbc.co.uk is that it doesn’t advertise certain stories as more important than others. There’s a “top news story,” but its headline doesn’t dwarf the other headlines as much as it does on boston.com or nytimes.com. And the picture attached to it is not nearly as eye-catching as nytimes.com’s (both of which had top stories related to Egypt and President Mubarak on Saturday when this blog article was written). This is part of a larger issue of image size on bbc.co.uk. Each section has a photo, but they’re so small that any drama or power of the image is lost. The Tribune and the Times both do a better job using pictures to keep your attention on the site.
Bottom-line, bbc.co.uk seems very utilitarian. Maybe the British have different aesthetic notions about websites. although the London Times and London Sun have more attractive websites. The website may also be undone by the breadth of the BBC’s programming. There are news shows, so the website has to provide information. But the BBC also produces sitcoms, dramas, sports programming, everything, so it has to devote space on the front-page to all interests. Hence, the website’s front page may truly be a “portal” in that it’s designed almost entirely to direct you elsewhere. The site still has far more news content than any equivalent American channel’s website, all of which devote the majority of their front pages to programming. And bbc.co.uk’s layout means less scrolling, a problem that MSNBC’s website suffers from.
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