Last week the BBC did a complete overhaul of their sports pages. Everything: look, style and navigation has been changed.
There’s nothing softly softly about this. The Beeb have picked up a giant flourescent sledge hammer and gone to town on this one.
The question is, does redesign work? And is they’re anything we can learn from it?
Website redesigns can generally be labelled a ‘success’ if they do either or both of the following:
1) Freshen things up and keep readers engaged
2) Save people time by simplifying menus and making navigation more straightforward
So how does the BBC Sport redesign website fare here?
Well, let’s run through a couple of the major changes…
They’ve now swapped the sidebar navigation for a top menu navigation bar. They’ve done this to make the page wider which allows them to give a greater focus on media and video content. Whether this will be a welcome change is yet to be seen, but navigation wise I think this is a smart move. Many of us are trained to ‘look up’ when we look for website menus. Sport lends itself to more video orientated content with highlights, interviews so it’ll be interesting to see how this all out web TV experience pans out over the long term.
Yellow, yellow… EVERYWHERE
Perhaps the biggest change is the bold new colour scheme. It’s anything but understated with bright yellow now dominating the page. Speak to a colour wheel whisperer and they’ll tell you that yellow is supposed to reprent “happiness” and “humour”. There’s a flip slide with these things though and it’s also thought by some to represent “madness”. In this case I think madness dominates.
When it comes to bright colours on any website, moderation is key. It’s great to stand out and a splash of yellow would brighten up any web page… but this is no splash. The BBC have treated us to an ocean of yellow here. It may yet prove to be a stroke of genius once the dust settles… but right now it’s making me want to take two alka seltzers, put 12 pairs of sunglasses on and hide under the duvet in the embryo position.
2 responses to “Have the BBC gone ‘mad’ with their sports site redesign?”
The BBC’s new look sports website is absolute rubbish. The football section in particular is now much more difficult to get around. with the old one, you got more or less everything on one page, particularly the leagues below the premiership….but now, you have to change pages to get such things as league tables, top scorers etc. I am considering boycotting this site unless they put things back to what they were.
Hi Ron, I’m fascinated to see the upshot of this change. It seems a lot of people aren’t happy with the new look/navigation. Already they seem to have cut back a little on the yellow. Nothing dramatic but definitely some minor amendments have already been made (if you look at the banner at the top now compared to how it was in the screenshot above).