Homepage Update
You may have read that yesterday we had some problems with the bbc.co.uk homepage.
Around lunchtime, the Feed Engine application which powers our customisable panels on our new-look homepage tied itself in knots. Rather than presenting the text and images in a nice neat moveable box, it got the text and the pictures mixed up. The result of this was lots of random binary characters being presented to our users.
This was picked up very quickly, both by our internal monitoring and complaints from our users.
Since the feeds system is integral to our homepage design, we decided to switch our homepage to our emergency "lite" version. The lite page is something we have on standby in case of large news events or technical problems which impact our ability to serve pages in a timely response to our readers. The page has no customisable panels and is far smaller in terms of page weight. Since it doesn't rely on the problem panels we decided to roll it out.
It took about 20 minutes or so from the page being broken to get the lite version up and running. We then started an investigation into the problem and when things looked stable we released the proper homepage again.
Only once before have we moved to the lite homepage because of a technical fault. The last time was caused by flooding. Normally, it's only huge news events that force us to scale back our page weight.
Then, at about ten to one in the morning, it happened again. Luckily we have monitoring in place so the relevant people were all woken up and the lite page reinstated. Through the night, the lite page was monitored until a dedicated developer turned up to work at six o'clock this morning to find the root cause and hopefully fix the issue once and for all. We turned back to the normal homepage at half past nine this morning.
Since then, it's been stable and we expect it to remain so. Touch wood.
Our apologies for the inconvenience caused.
Andrew MacInnes is Head of FM Operations, BBC Future Media & Technology. Simplified homepage grabbed by Ryan Morrison.
© MMIX~RS~q~RS~~RS~z~RS~29~RS~)
Comments
Andrew - thanks for the frank explanation of the homepage's problem.
Perhaps a colleague will post something similar about iPlayer's reliability problems over the last two or three weeks - which nobbled downloads (and to a lesser extent streaming) this week, and early-expired downloaded content a couple of weeks ago.
I was going to complain about the lack of a screenshot, but there's one on Flickr:
http://flickr.com/photos/upyourego/2331193024/
^_^
I would like to loose the main feature on the home page. It is not the reason I use the site. Anything that causes me to scroll down to a regular item is not a service but a hindrance. It fails, to me at least, the test of offering "something interesting". A less arrogant stance might be to offer it as a selectable tab - no more or less important than any other content? If readers want it they will choose it. Or is that to much of a challenge to be taken up?
Oops !
Well know used page for a week, bever once found a single element in the main panel of any interest whatsoever.
7 days, 28 tabs - and not one meets my interested, new, politics and sport.
Ok i may be a bit dull, but this is not ITV where i expect dog adverts (dont have dog), hemmeroid adverts ( ok in that dept), etc etc etc
This is the Beep - how sad to see one of my main home pages descend from being useful to nothing more than bland advert for services the Beeb provide that i have no interest in whatsoever.
Sad to see editors seen loads of feedback, but users wrong.... and these editors whose agenda is clearly to advertise Beeb activities not supply useful information...
How sad....
Is bbc still on my main home page lists follwing this MASSIVE development and change...
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...
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Nope!
Beauty of the interent, you can also find what you want, news, politics and sport.... simple really.....
ho hum
Mr. B
Josh - the post now has a screengrab. Thanks and hope you like.
Josh - the post now has a screengrab. Thanks and hope you like.
I am sorry I missed the simplified version of the homepage: it looks a lot more user friendly than the interactively-cluttered mess of the new-look homepage.
I use the Beeb's homepage as my own. It is a gateway. The simpler the better. I don't care if I could customise it to be simpler - that is in itself a complexity I don't need.
I suppose I could go back to the Sky homepage (my ISP).
Anybody know of any simple homepages?
Paul
What a shame the "lite" version of the homepage isn't in actual fact the old homepage. That way you could give us a permanent option of using the old homepage instead of the current abomination.
@brian h, who said:
"how sad to see one of my main home pages descend from being useful to nothing more than bland advert for services the Beeb provide that i have no interest in whatsoever."
Brian, if you're still around - I'm confused. As far as I can tell, the content on the BBC Homepage has not changed. It's always featured a main panel that plugs BBC content. What did the BBC homepage offer before which you valued but has now gone?
i really wish that the page would fit 800 * 600 screens again. this new layout takes too long to load as well. I agree with G Sherman - have the content, sure, but give users the choice to have a simple 'old school' page.
It's a shame that the "Lite" version of the page can't be continually available as an alternative to the "Heavy" (normal) version. It's much easier to use!
A very customisable service you could use as a homepage is Netvibes.
I hope that the BBC goes down the more customisable route. For instance, I would like to be able to access more BBC blogs directly, access news from more than one locality, and be able to filter the news shown by category, for instance I don't think that Sports should come under News!
The "lite" version of the homepage wasn't that much better than the one it temporarily repleced. It was still amateurish and far too big and still required excessive scrolling. The old homepage had more content per square centimeter of screen and so required less scrolling to find things.
In its continued efforts to 'dumb down' BBC output, the homepage (and it seems ever more BBC pages) has mutated from a high class infomation source to something approaching a lower end tabloids in appearance.
And as for that 'promo area' - don't let me start on THAT waste of time and space!
It's interesting that (in the other blog pages) none of the 'team' (including Richard Titus, James Price, nor Bronwyn van der Merwe) have updated their entries to answer the vast number of criticisms leveled at the homepage design and functionality. I expect they are still preening and congratulating themselves too much on their radical new design. Why dont; teh yadmit they made a huge error, bit the bullet and give us back the far better old homepage? Oh wait a moment - perhaps they can't respond? Perhaps the BBC has seen sense and has terminated their contracts for wasting licence payers money!
Martin Wace
Ironically the "emergency" page is much better than the "normal" one.
In web design and development "lightweight" is seen as being good. A shame the BBC staff don't know this.