Einar Thorsen

Professor of Journalism and Communication at Bournemouth University

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BBC News website redesign – comments from editors and designers

15 July, 2010 by Einar Thorsen Leave a Comment

Steve Herrmann, editor of the BBC News website:

What’s new:
• a fresh, updated design, with more space for the main stories of the day
• better use of video and images
• clearer and more prominent labelling and signposting of key stories, whether you are on the front page or a story page
• a better indication of which are the most recent headlines
• easier ways to share stories with others, for those who wish to, on social media networks

As I also mentioned in my earlier post, some important things are staying just the same, for example:
• all the content is still there: the best of the BBC’s journalism in text, audio and video?
• the latest news headlines will be as quick and comprehensive as ever ?
• accuracy remains at the core of our editorial values?
• we’ve been careful to keep things simple and easy to use; you have told us how important this is

From: BBC News website redesign (2)

Paul Sissons, UX Team Lead, BBC Future Media & Technology:

Fundamental to the new GVL is bold, strong type and crisp, un-cluttered layouts. The gradients and textures of “Web 2.0” are gone, and everything is pared down to the minimum required for delivering news.

….

With an incentive, users will scroll. If that proves a positive interaction, it’s something that could become habitual. So rather than design our indexes and front page with everything at the top of the page, we are encouraging scrolling by putting richer content within stories and towards the bottom.

….

Across the project, there was a concern that larger images, bolder headlines and more links could make pages overbearing. Having a column of white at the right-hand side of a story’s body was one of the design decisions made explicitly to counter this.

From: BBC News website redesign: telling the story

Erik Huggers, Director of BBC Future Media & Technology:

This has been a major engineering project for the Future Media and Technology Division and I believe it’s a great example of engineering and design working hand in glove with editorial – a way of working that I talked about at the Media Guardian Changing Media Summit earlier this year. To give an example we have improved the content management system, which will make it easier for journalists to upload their story and add video and pictures to it more quickly and gives them better control of the layout.

From: BBC News website redesign

Filed Under: Blog, Links Tagged With: BBC, bbcnews, bbconline, erikhuggers, paulsissons, redesign, steveherrmann

BBC News website redesign

6 July, 2010 by Einar Thorsen Leave a Comment

Steve Herrmann:

And we've done something which will be less obvious to you, but hugely important to the journalists working on the site. We've completely rebuilt the content production system (CPS) which we use to create content and run the site. The new version of the CPS is designed to be easier to use and – crucially when we want to get stories out to you fast – quicker too. It's also built to be more flexible, so it should be easier to keep the site evolving, and to produce the content in ways that work well on other platforms, such as mobile.

External link

Filed Under: Links Tagged With: BBC, bbcnews, cms, cps, design, news, online, redesign, steveherrmann, webdesign

A new record – BBC – The Editors

8 May, 2010 by Einar Thorsen Leave a Comment

    Steve Herrmann:

    "- We had 11.4m individual users to the News website on Friday – approximately – so that breaks our previous record of 9.2m (that was on 5 November 2008 for the Obama election victory)
    – There were about 30m page views for the constituency results pages
    – Over 100m page views in total
    – About 6.5m page views to the election live page"

    External link

    Del.ici.us tags: election2010 bbc bbconline steveherrmann statistics

Filed Under: Links Tagged With: BBC, bbconline, election2010, statistics, steveherrmann

BBC News online coverage of prime-ministerial debate – BBC The Editors

3 May, 2010 by Einar Thorsen Leave a Comment

    Steve Herrmann:

    Online, it looks from our provisional figures as though we had around 3.2m UK unique users visiting the BBC News website yesterday and just under 3m internationally. The live coverage page on the build-up and the debate itself received around 850,000 UK pageviews and the live stream had over 350,000 plays – more than either of the previous two debates.

    For the first time, we ran the live stream directly on the BBC News Facebook page, from where it could be shared, and it was also on their Democracy UK page.

    We made it available to other sites too – including several UK newspaper sites, Yahoo, Fox News and the New York Times. Following the debate there's an on-demand version also available to embed. On our own site, we're currently linking on the front page to a searchable video and transcript of the debate.

    Alongside the video last night, we provided rapid updates via Twitter and our live page from BBC correspondents because we see them as a valuable extra element.

    External link

    Del.ici.us tags: steveherrmann election2010 tvdebates bbconline bbc

Filed Under: Links Tagged With: BBC, bbconline, election2010, steveherrmann, tvdebates

BBC News online coverage of Election 2010 – BBC – The Editors

6 April, 2010 by Einar Thorsen Leave a Comment

    BBC News online coverage of Election 2010 – BBC – The Editors

    Steve Herrmann on BBC's online coverage of UK election:

    "Our focus will be on up-to-the-minute live reporting and video of all the key moments, as well as in-depth information, analysis and context to help make sense of it all."

    Del.ici.us tags: election2010 bbc steveherrmann

Filed Under: Links Tagged With: BBC, election2010, steveherrmann