Refreshing changes

Whoa! I got a fright when I opened up the site this morning.

First impression is that it looks quite hard to read. The text seems oddly light, and apart from the headlines, it doesn't really jump out at you. And giving the stories room to breath is fine, but it looks a wee bit 'sparse'...

I use a lot of news-sites, and always loved the BBC's simplicity and lack of fussiness - I'm glad that you've basically retained that format.

Where is the link to the Weather?!? We're British! That should be front and centre!

Why doesn't the site just expand to the width of the browser, rather than being fixed to a particular value?

I like the new look, much fresher, particularly the embedded vide clips. I do miss the link to the weather page though, I used to use that a lot.

Horrible.

bring back the old tabs at the top of the page navigation!

I can't stand the new layout. The old design meant that my browser window did not have to fill the width of my screen. The new design does. I hate it.

I would like to see the top story in Welsh under the Newyddion link

I don't think it's an improvement. More screen space has been wasted by the unnecessary masthead (especially the huge search box) and extra white space than has been gained by increasing the page width. I now have to scroll down more to read all the front page, which can't be good. It seems to me that this is a change for its own sake, rather than one driven by need.

Generally I like this new design, and the greater screen space it takes up. However I feel there is a bit too much vertical space between lines in places, particularly in the right hand column and the news category summaries at the bottom of the news front page, which makes it harder to read. The old layout was nice and tightly spaced for these sections.

Why all the white space, now I have to scroll far more. All for using more width, but why put a great big grey bar down the left hand side.

More and more people are getting wide screens, so make use of the width, and don't make pages longer.

I thought my eyes were deceiving me this morning when one of the news pages looked 'different'. Luckily there was nothing wrong with my eyes, and I am very happy with the new layout.
The narrow content width always annoyed me (more than most as my screen is 1280 wide). You're right about 'more room to breathe', the content feels much more relaxed.
(P.S. I'm sure someone using Mosaic browser on Windows 95 will complain though!)

What a surprise this morning, when I logged on to the site.
There are things I like, such as the wider pages, but I'm not so sure about the 'room to breathe' idea; it makes the BBC site look a lot less individual, of it's own style, and more like all the other news sites.
As regards the embedded video, well I doubt I will notice it because I prefer to just read stories for myself on the PC. If I want to watch the news I turn on the telly.
But the biggest disappointment for me is the dropping of the customized local area. In there I had the local headlines, the local weather and the England cricket headlines. It was very handy, and I cannot understand why it has been dropped.

Although I do like the new design of the site, the addition of extra line spacing I do have one bone to pick with the width being set to 1024.

Although I run my monitor at 1024 wide I also have the Vista sidebar to always be on top, losing about 100-150 pixels of the screen. So now I have to scroll over to the right to see the whole page. Only a minor irratation as the main content is still in view.

I was happy enough with the old style web page, but I could understand the desire to make the page wider if the intention was to put more headlines on one page.

However, there doesn't appear to be any more headlines, just the same number but more spaced out.

Also, we've lost the 'News For Your Area', or whatever it was called, where you entered your postcode and it gave a summary of local news/weather.

And I preferred the Latest News ticker at the top in bold, as it stood out more.

Sorry for being grumpy - first thing on a Monday morning is not the best time to make changes!

Very nice... But where's the link to Weather?!

The big black band at the top seems kind of pointless. The old header at least had a few more links on it and was therefore more useful, but yet was still smaller.

The new design looks nicer but from a readibility perspective it is inferior. The old layout and width is much more readable and allows the user to digest a lot of information quickly. The combination of more space around text, lighter text style and changes to text alignment make the new design a bit harder to read.

I don't know about a site refresh? This new layout seems to be quite different to all those preceding.

Like any change, it will take some time to get used to.

I must say I miss the three or four headlines for each section of Around the World Now, which is now limited to one headline per section.

It basically requires me to click on each section heading to get the details I had before on the front page.

All in all I think I prefer the more compact original version.

What a fantastic new look. Full screen instead of two thirds looks fantastic on my screen, easier to read, so much white space, cleaner pages and text is clearer. Brilliant. Please continue to do it on all the news pages.

Is it possible to get back to the old version please ...
The new version is hard on the eyes, and uses more space to show less.
Why, why, why couldn't you listen to the people who said please leave it alone ?

New Design looks great.

However why is it still so small... It just about fits halfway across my monitor :( Most people dont have 15" CRTs any more you know, I dread to think how small its going to be when my 30" monitor arrives.

I'm all for the wider design but the text is hard to read in comparison with the old design. It's too light and the spacing, particularly in the around the UK now section seems out. Also 'more space' is sometimes too much space, around 'FEATURES, VIEWS, ANALYSIS' for instance. A bit of tweaking and it will be a positive step forward.

I find it difficult to read - there's not enough delineation between areas and the fonts are too narrow and light-coloured against the white background. Please beef it up a bit!

As mentioned in a previous comment the text is too 'light grey' to be read easily. It makes the news seem vague. Generally nice changes, though local news needs to return. Thanx

No link to weather or sport page etc. direct from front page. I use those links a lot, having the main front page as my home page. Please add those links back.
Thanks.

A very 'Web 2.0' refresh for the BBC, and I like it. Very glad to see this and can't wait for it to be rolled out across every page. I like how it doesn't look as busy and cluttered as the old style, there is definitely more room to breathe- the slight changes will take some getting used to be I'm certain this will be a successful new layout, great job!

Nice, but where has the local news/weather section gone? Please bring that area back. It was useful

Will you allow more user choice on what the news page can display (eg, can I set a "no sports" flag etc?)

Also, are your servers suffering at the moment?

OK so the web site has changed. However it is not immediately readable at a glance for people like myself who speed read and who have been involved with IT developments since the 1970's.
The new format is clear, but lacks sufficient information per article to make a judgement as to what to read and what not.
If you want to grab a viewer or reader, proper CONTRAST between text and COLOUR images are necessary.
Having blue text actually puts slightly more strain on the eyes and the more 'open' structure with lots of 'whitespace' wastes content space. It is reminiscent of some early (and some say clumsy) ISP sites before they switched on to content.
8 out of 10 for effort. CAN DO BETTER!

I mostly like it, and it's a welcome refresh, but to echo T Adair, some of the vertical spacing is too large for comfortable reading. Overall the "blackness" of the pages has reduced significantly, and while there was certainly room for more looseness in that regard, it may have gone a little bit too far.

None of which takes away from the continuing general excellence of web design from the BBC - more power to your elbows.

The main page is no problem, but where is the section which allowed local county news to be displayed every time we logged on?

It'd be really good if the site expanded to the size of the window. While most people now have a screen 1024 or wider not everyone will have the window maximised all the time. It is now much harder to reader in a smaller window.

I don't like the new design; fully half my screen (on the right) is blank, and all the meaningful text is squished into the left third of my screen. It feels unnatural to be reading things so close to the edge of my monitor. I wish things were centered still. That said, I do like the more airy feel to the site

Is there a mobile version of the site? On my Nokia N800 I can see almost no news without scrolling down. Not an improvement.

Where is the grey bar at the top of the site with link "Home, TV, Radio, Talk, Where I Live, A-Z Index". Without this how to I get to radio website for example?

Hmmm..Glad you've gone for 'evolution..' or there might be a revolution !

The BBC Wales site looks good.

But where is the weather report ? Wherever it is we must weather the fact that the weather is not as easy to find as it was before. Whatever !

Looks nice, but is it just me or the amount of headlines displayed is less?

Clearly a work in progress. The main business page is old style (although stories seem to be in new style) as is the "England" page.

The redesigned site looks really good chaps, chapeau! Glad to see you centered it and kept plenty of 'white-space', it's a valuable visual element. Let's give it a month before giving an opinion on usability, surely as good.

Aaargh! I thought at first that something had gone wrong with my browser settings.

It might look nice, but pretty-pretty is no substitute for straightforward usability. For a start, I now need my browser to take up more screen space to allow for the greater width. And how about the front page links to local news and the weather?

Not good, I'm afraid: the triumph of form over function. (Why does Heathrow Terminal 5 come to mind ..?)

Blindingly obvious perhaps but where' the weather link gone to? I had assumed news and weather were linked.

Where has the link to the weather gone? It was one of my most used links.

What has happened to the weather and associated items ?? These are an essential part of our day.

Yes, where's the local news and weather gone? Far more useful than some of the other links on the front page. Bring it back!

Nice to see the page has been widened somewhat - this has been a long-term BBC News bugbear of mine, and many others it seems. It's a shame then that the increased space seems to be used for menus and links, rather than the main article text! Grrrr!

One other thing; the embedded player sometimes refuses to let me watch content, saying that I need to be in the UK to view. Now, unless Edinburgh, Rochdale, Manchester and London (my location and ISP's routing points) have suddenly jumped into some other territory, your geo-IP technology seems to need a bit of work to avoid aggravating some users.

What's even more ridiculous is that the main page is the new format and other gepgraphical/theme pages (Asia, Europe, Scotland, Entertainment etc) still use the old format. Talk about frustrating! I would have thought it better to change the format on all pages at once. Finally (for now), the headlines for "Other Top Stories" etc are too far apart.

I like the redesign.

Pity it doesn't stretch to all the pages. Science and Health were still with the old format when I looked this morning. It's normally a good plan to release new things in their finished format, rather than half finished.

The weather link also needs to be returned. News & Weather have always been together, there was no reason to remove it.

Have not yet fully looked at the site but the wider page is a pain. It means that I cannot look at both the BBC page and my list of incoming emails at the same time if I want to be able to see the whole page. So I therefore will have to keep shifting the page from side to side which is a nuisance. (Being female I am a multi-tasker!)

First glance made me feel the page was empty as there was too much spacing between words. I liked the tight compact format of before. If so many people had said do not change then why change? If it ain't broke, then don't fix it.

I note others say the weather is missing, not too worried as prefer more accurate forecasts. I noted that the weather page was not very accurate in that the Latitude/Longitude did not match the post code given. eg: CO10 which is actually in the south of Suffolk had a lat/long for near Birmingham. This could explain why I found the weather not very accurate.

It looks really bad having the BBC logo on the black bar, then again immediately below as part of the BBC News logo. Can't this be improved somehow?

Looks like a mess. I do have a high res screen (1280 pixels wide) but I don't have my browser filling the screen. There's a lot of wasted space and you still have that irritating latest news ticker which displays text slower than a person can read. Have more stories "above the cut" on the first screen, reduce the font size and replace the 2 banners at the top with one smaller one. For now the low graphics version or the RSS feed looks like it will be more practical.

Very insulting!
Now over 9cm are taken up with the useless top bands. I come for reading the news, not for seeing such wasted space at the top forcing me to scroll down to see the other half of the page.

Automatic refresh is terrible when one is reading, and it insults the intelligence of your readers. You are saying they themselves cannot click on the refresh icon.

To force Flash usage onto your readers to receive video tells them that you want them tracked by IP address for every Flash using site to which they go.

And the last insult is your centering the page and telling readers now we make better use of the screen. There is grey nothing on both sides, instead of just one side. You need better focus groups.

It doesnt look too good on an iPhone... some strange text sizes forcing unnatural and ugly linebreaks. Not sure about so much whitespace either.

A couple of comments on Steve Herrmann's points:

"But we now reckon that 95% of you have your screen resolution set to 1024 pixels or wider"

Just because the screen is 1024 wide doesn't mean we need to fill it with a single browser window, I like to have several session visible on the screen.

"and we’re confident that it’s the right time to use the extra space to improve the site."

What, by keeping the same content and double-spacing the text.

I welcome the updating of the website. But, the contrast of the print is such as my wife who is visually impaired can no longer read it. A darker print would be welcome.

No thanks. I have altered my set up to take account of the wider page and the result is the print is far too small to read comfortably. I have been used to viewing the BBC National and SW Wales news several times a day but this the last time unless you change back.

The new look is OK, but just because I have a large monitor doesn't mean I want to have a wide browser window. And why on earth was the weather link removed? It should be added back to the Related BBC sites in the left margin.

Ok the design may change from time to time, apart from bring back the weather link and a fast link to my local newsite it feels like business as usual in a new format. The dreadful wider page needs ditching quickly. I am deciding already not to bother to try and read the whole page where I am constantly having to move the page to read the entire story. The alternative of smaller print is even worse - we dont all have 20:20 vision. Come on, think accessibility and bring back the full page!

The text is too pale to read comfortably. Both the body text and the hyperlinks are far less distinct. I have fairly average eyesight (for my age) and I find it hard to read. I think that less able folk will have trouble. Tweak up the colours please.

In terms of style, if the old look was the Times, it now looks like the Beano. I though the old style had more gravitas.

Good job. Please remember although many people have big screens, they do multitask and might not use fullscren.

Gahhh!

Ok on the whole its an improvement - wider - hurrah!

BUT BUT BUT - I can't get the entire home page into a window without scrolling any more. The vertical spacing is excessive, and there is no way I can justify a higher resolution screen because the BBC News page no longer fits!

Although I have my screen resolution set wider than 1024, I rarely have my browser window maximised!

Do you not think it a little arrogant forcing your audience to resize their browser window like this?

First glance: nice, spacey and much easier to read.

Closer look: horizontal scrollbars at 800x600 and 415 errors in the markup, Also fails accessibility tests.

Opinion: A bit like Terminal 5 - looks good and I'm sure the bugs will be ironed out eventually.

Really don't like it.

The new masthead is just vanity. The old one was bad, but this one is just pointless and takes up too much space.

The new pastel colours are a bit lightweight. Too BBC Breakfast, and not enough Ten O'Clock News.

You've made the audio and video panel a permanent feature - despite people - myself included not wanting it, and actually wanting to close it on the old design! And to add insult to injury, you can't now have selected local news!

Where were the colours for the news programmes box chosen? It all looks a bit random.

I don't like the new image sizes either - and some of the graphic images (for the parking story - a cartoon graphic of a traffic warden and a clamp) are a bit basic.

I like that it will make use of 1024 size, but I don't like the space on the pages.

Overall the looks is a bit Fisher-Price "My first website" - something that you make with a wizard in Front Page or something. I might now just bookmark your individual section homepages instead of coming to the front, or I may start using RSS. Could you start putting full stories within the RSS feeds please?

A silly waste of licence-payer's money and another example of the relentless advance towards turning the Web into a Fisher-Price wonderland for simpletons.

Terrible!

Hi,
Great new look - but
WHERE'S THE WEATHER???

Sorry, I think it was better the way it was. If it must change then at least look at Ganesh Sittampalam's comment.

I do like the use of the wide screen but it is completely negated by the excessive vertical white space between the lines and the articles. I spend most of the time having to scroll up and down to find something. For people with RSI this is definitely a backward step.

Cant see the whole width anymore, doesnt look professional anymore!

On the general news page, I see only one heading in each territorial category (i.e. Europe, Africa etc), where in old design there were two newsheadings. By all means bring that back!
And, since I tend to start the morning with your site - I'd like to say thanx for your work.
Serge, Moscow

Looks great on my widescreen monitor.

Is there a link to have the old design instead? Thx.

Disappointed by the change - you said people wanted more efficient use of the screen space, yet you've basically taken white space from the bottom and right and mixed it into the rest of the page.

Net result is a lot of white space and a page that needs scrolling in two directions to view properly.

Yes, most people have 1024 pixel wide displays now. No, not everybody uses their web browser full-screen.

Perhaps you could consider providing skins for the website - the technology fully enables such an approach, and it would allow people to view an efficent, easy to read, informative news website and also let people view the new one.

Agree that most people run monitors at 1024*768 pixels. But my web browser is only one of my active windows - I hardly ever use it fully maximized. My choice therefore is between allowing the BBC News website to monopolise my desktop (and dictate how I work) or to view only part of the page.

The style you now have looks dull, unispiring with too much space and it looks like too little news - as now you have to scroll to see what there is. Really don't like what you have done - sorry but I think the design is flawed.

The content-free masthead is too big, and notwithstanding the fact that most people may have screen resolutions larger than 1024x768, most people don't set every window to fill the entire screen. Personally I like my window about the same size and shape on screen as a sheet of A4 paper; on a 100DPI display that means it's just over 800 pixels wide, about half the width of the screen.

Ideally the content would flow according to the width of the browser window and not be fixed to a particular size.

6/10, must try harder.

It's horrible! My computer screen is tiny and I can't navigate my way around the site easily because it is now so big on the screen. It's also hard to find things or to scan down the page and see the thing you want because everything is so spaced out. Please change it back, I really can't read it!

I think it's excellent, although I did think I was seeing things this morning as the pages kept switching between old and new...

The new larger and centred design makes a much better use of a 22" monitor, the old one was just squashed onto the left hand side of the screen. It just looks so much cleaner, and lighter.

The only thing that's really ever bugged me about the BBC News site, is the little news ticker at the top. I catch an interesting story out of the corner of my eye and the link disappears before I can click on it. then I have to wait for all the stories to roll around again - not only that, but typed interminably slowly from left to right! Maybe one for the next refresh? :)

Give us time to get used to this newness!

I agree with Robin Fisher about the black bar across the top. I'd say it needs to he half it's current height, with the red one taking the saved space.

But I'm definitely liking it overall. It was time for a fresh look, and this does fit the bill. Well done, and congratulations on sticking your necks out!

1. I find the new design too wide. My screen width is 1280 pixels, but I never use maximised windows. I now have to make my browser window nearly as wide as the screen to avoid sideways scrolling, which cuts down available space for other windows beside it.

I agree with Ganesh - just make the content expand to the width of the browser, then everyone will be happy.

2. The font sizes are all over the place in Firefox. The main article text is too large, but every so often I reach a paragraph of text so tiny I can hardly read it. The contrast is very jarring.

What's more you've somehow managed to defeat the font size user preferences in Firefox so I can't adjust it myself!

Not keen on the new site. Far too loose, and much too much white space. I prefered the tighter layout that was in place, and the rows seem too deep compared to the columns.

Even running at 1024 pixels wide, with the sidebar in place a lot of the content in the far left column is lost.

Great to have gone wider but there really too much vertical white space. Even in this post a paragraph tag adds something silly like 2 lines of vertical space. Overall it looks good but form should follow function and it's harder to read than it used to be.

But worst of all the weather and local news sections have gone! Why?

And embedded video? Er, where? The links I've clicked on have opened new player windows.

Hello,

Looks good though no link to the weather - a major omission, I could only get to weather via sport.

Also where has my local news gone?

Regards.

I agree 100% with mk's post (post 8). Bring back the old tabs.

Also, where is the area where I can choose the local news and sport that I want to read??

Hi good morning, just a quick note to say how much i am liking the NEW BBC news pages! I have been mightily impressed with the changes that were made to the BBC hompage and radio pages over the last couple of months and was pleasantly surprised this morning when i logged on. Great work!

Miss the option of typing in my postcode and being able to see my local news headlines and weather on the main page. Speaking of which.. where is the weather link?

PLEASE - put the 'Weather' link back! It's really annoying to have to click through two pages to get to it! Apart from that it's a nice look, a bit more like reading a broadsheet than a web page.

I do like the new look but WHERE IS THE WEATHER LINK ???

Nice redesign- but please reinstate the direct links to the radio, tv and other BBC areas!

Looks very nice - the extra width is great, and brings the site right up-to-date (and should signal the end of any other web-designers creating new sites in 800px width).

However, where's the customisable 'Local News/Local Weather/Favourite Sport (or Football Team)' section gone? This was always the first thing I looked at on the home page.

Where's the Weather shortcut gone to?

One thing that has changed that you haven't mentioned (though a previous commenter has picked up on it) is that the text is now dark grey instead of pure black. This serves no purpose but to make the site harder to read due to the lesser contrast. I would encourage your designers to rethink this; function should never be sacrificed for form.

The links to the "Related BBC sites" is not prominent enough.

It's a pain to find BBC Sport! Weather, Sport and other prominent sub-sites of the BBC should be much more, well, prominent on the main BBC news site.

I simly love it!! Very user friendly.

Whilst wider may be better for some I would have thought that, like me, most people need to have several windows open on their computer, so the BBC News site is competeing for screen space. Thank Opera for having a fit to width button so I can contract the page to fit my window!

I agree with the comment that it is quite hard to read in places - some of the text is tiny and the contrast between text and background is low.

Also, I think there may now be too much space on the site - it was laid out beautifully, more than enough space to make everything clear...I read the BBC News for the content, not the space...

Overall, I'd say a good move. Not too radically different and definately easier on the eye. Not too sure about the black heading but apart from that well done.

Awesome new redesign! Welcome to the 21st Century ;)

Where's my local news?
Has the section devoted to local news really been removed completely or am I missing something?

Centering of pages - yuk. On the left hand side of my larger screen, where my eyes naturally go, I get a load of free space. Please return to left justified.

Can't find the weather anywhere! A work in progress maybe, but not yet convinced...

Much better! Keep up the good job! One humble suggestion: maybe the black row on the top could be a little bit smaller. Two BBC logos on the top seems unnecessary.

Whilst the design looks nicer and fresher, it is actually less practical as I now have to scroll down to read anything other than the top 7 or 8 stories, including the features and video sections which are some of the best things about the site. Getting rid of the large black BBC strip at the top would be a good start, but even then it wouldn't give as much length as I would want. I am not a curmudgeon against all change, but I do think for the moment I prefer the old design purely because I read more news and, after all, this is a news site!

generally - i love it. now it fills 2/3rds of my screen width. however the nice easy browse bars at the top have vanished. i can't find the sport (not that that's a complaint from me) but nor can i find the weather! that's usually half the reason i come on here to be honest!!!

other than that small moan, welcome to the modern world bbc - much much more modern! just make the font a little more....bold?

I don't really like it.

Yes, more space is better but why did you make all the headings almost indistinguishable from the text? Nothing is distinct any more and it's difficult to find the sections (e.g.: the tabs for "Most Emailed/Read etc).

You should have retained it like it was and just increased the space. What you have now is just bland and difficult to use. I want the old version back!

If there's anything guaranteed to drive me away from a website it's that if it doesn't fit on my screen.

We have a slew of new small screen devices coming out into the market place (mini-laptops, web-enable mobiles, etc.) so it's more important now than ever that you DON'T have a fixed width website.

I'm on a laptop, but my browser has a sidebar with an email client. Consequently, all navigation on the right side of BBC websites is now inaccessible to me. You are making the very naive assumption that everyone browses the web with all windows maximised.

By choosing to make the page fixed width you are simply alienating a sizable portion of potential viewers. This is a basic aspect of modern web design and again you have got it spectacularly wrong. Instead of too small and leaving a load of whitespace for people with larger screens, you have it too big and unusuable for people with small screens.

The simple solution is to just have the page fit the space available. If needs be you can set a maximum width so it does not stretch beyond legibility on large screens. This is something anyone with a knowledge of CSS would be able to accomplish in an afternoon. It's not hard.

I'd like to echo the questions about the weather link? So it may not actually be part of 'BBC News', but we viewers still think of News and Weather as one, whatever has happened internally within the BBC.

The new BBC design makes the website look like blogs that people write on Blogger. This association makes your news website look amateur. I liked the old design.

As others have said, the black masthead is truly awful and a real waste of screen space. I also think a quick link to Weather is a glaring omission from the front page. My only other comment would be that the redesign looks very "loose". I'm all for white space, but I think that the space between paragraphs, stories, etc could be reduced to make the whole thing look less "blog-like".

I'm happy with the old style, it now has too much space.

I, as I'm sure many people do....use the BBC for information which is fast and up to date.

An option to have the old version would be useful...after all one assumes it's just a style sheet.

Rob Lee
London

It's definitely too wide.. the old site worked just fine on almost any device and was very easy to read.

The site should be designed so that it adapts to the width of the screen the visitor is using, rather than dictating 1024 pixel across.

As a Visually impaired person I find the new web site much harder to read especially the blue writing on a white background

eek! Is there any way to view the old style? Gone are the days of a single glance at the page to check the news, I guess; I've got to move my eyes twice as far to see the info I want as everything is so spread out.

Please can we have a way of viewing in the old layout?

I really like the new main BBC front page, but I think this is a bit disappointing really.

The double banners at the top look really ugly together, especially as the 'BBC' logo is repeated (and not even aligned) - and why not use a version of the front page banner with the clock?

Also, the spacing is very odd throughout, and it seems a little too sparse in places. The line spacing the main directory of sections at the bottom of the page is quite messy and distracting.

And where's the link to the weather?!?

I'm sure you'll get it right in time, but it doesn't seem quite there yet - pity you didn't try a beta out first.

Must bring back link to weather! Otherwise good.

My computer is temporarily in the same room as our DAB digital radio which is almost permanently playing radio four. Unfortunately, the computor makes the radio sound 'fluffy' so whilst on the computer I have been playing the radio through the computer so that I can still hear it whilst on the computer. This morning if I navigate away from the radio to , say, email, it stops playing, unlike before, so I am now faced with an either/or choice of radio or computer.
This is NOT an improvement. When do I get BOTH computer and radio back?

Generally the pages "feel lighter", but:

Where is the link to the weather?

Where has the customisable local news/sport section gone? Given that the BBC homepage now allows us to customise that page, why have you taken the backward step of removing this feature? Furthermore, you've "specifically" told us what has changed, but neglected to mention the removal of this feature!

I HATE it! Sorry. Too sparse and spread out, too big (cannot see whole front page on screen), text is too light. Yuk!

It is difficult to believe you did much usability testing on this with typical users. Did you? There is no mention of it in this article. You ought to be doing it given the number of users. It is particularly annoying to have to scroll down for top article links section which you didn't have to before. It would be better if you have to stick with this design to put these on a separate page.

It's a great light look that BBC designers will be proud of. It really should resize with the browser though.

Sorry, but I hate it. I use Firefox on a Mac with my minimum font size set to 13px, and the page looks dreadful like that, but is illegible if I unset it. For me, it pushes too much of the content below the fold.

And why couldn't you build a fluid page, rather than a fixed width one.

I really miss the link I had to local news and weather.

I understand that it needed a revamp, but I think that you have removed a lot of usability.

I approve of the increase in picture size and use of the screen width.

The most obvious problem is the poor choice of colours for text. The brightness of the white areas drowns out the light grey that is used for most of the stories.

Please use darker colours for text or a different background, otherwise I will send you my opticians bill.

The masthead and branding is just a load of corporate tosh. When are you going to realise how much this annoys the users?

I do love the new revamp - nice and fresh like the headings down the left and right.

Unfortunately though I really hate the main part of the page because of the extra spacing, where before all the headings were on one screen (e.g. Science, Entertainment) Now I have to scroll down the page to see them. (and this is on a resolution of 1280x1024)

Badly thought out.

Overall the changes seem OK. The right part of the global header seems rather bare, hopefully they'll be something there eventually.

I've noticed as I've been refreshing the page this morning various bits have been added. So hopefully the local news panel will reappear in some form, as it was a handy feature.

I agree with Robin Fisher regarding the top banner - in my opinion it's far too big and wastes space, especially since there is another banner right under it! I'm convinced that the search bar and two links (Low graphics & Accessibility help) could have been incorporated somewhere else, giving readers a bigger view of the site once they open it. As of right now, the two banners take up almost 20% of the vertical space on the web site when viewed on my computer...

I'm probably one of those who would have said don't change a thing, but at least you haven't completely changed the site.

Oh, and the weather link is present it's merely called "World weather" and is located under the top stories section. Still, I agree that it should be more prominent.

I was perfectly happy with the previous design. If it wasn't broken why fix it? At least most of the fundamentals are still there. The extra width hasn't really added value, simply made extra steps (scroll across back and forth)necessary to see the whole page. The worst loss is the ability to place local news, weather and sport items on the front page. Please restore them! Thank you.

Frankly, it's a shambles. The front page is very clean, and the design is good. However go deeper into the site/pages and the rendering/formatting is all over the place.
Opera and Firefox cannot display the 'England' page correctly and even IE is unable to cope with (for example) the Sport/Motorsport formatting.

Looks like it was tested as much as BA's T5 project..

It'll take some time to get used to I'm sure.

Must still be a few niggles since some pages show the old design, whilst other seem broken in places.

Yes, my screen is over 1024 pixels wide, and has been for many years, but that doesn't mean my browser window is full-screen. The operating system is called "Windows" and it is a long time since we've needed to devote the whole PC to a single application.

By all means allow the website to expand to fill the available space, but please don't force me to scroll because I don't have my whole screen devoted to the browser.

I certainly believe that this new design is an improvement - I just don't think it goes far enough. With the advent of the fantastic new BBC homepage, when changes to the news site were announced, I was expecting more than just a wider page and larger text. The two things which I most wanted to see were:

- customisable content: I really love the new BBC homepage, especially due to the customisation options. I was hoping for "Technology", "Have Your Say" and "News Blogs" 'widgets' to move around the page at my own discretion.

- embedded video: Why do I still need to browse through countless popups to watch 95% of videos when you've got your new "embedded media player"? Surely it is possible to have a short clip in place of the (thankfully larger) pictures that go with your top stories. Or how about being able to watch News 24 live from the actual news homepage?

I think the new site is better, but it could still be improved.

I generally read this news page at work and do it in a reduced window rahter then maximised.

This new design makes it hearder for me so see the whole page and really does make the pages look sparce as has already been mentioned

What ever happened to the old saying if it isn't broken don't fix it?

Much more stylish, but far prefered the simple clarity over style.

It's too long - a lot harder to take in all the headlines than the old site. Could we not choose which version we prefer like a Google theme? Compactness was a big plus which has been lost.

Wider is certainly much better, but the longer web page is just annoying. The main reason I liked the BBC news page was that unlike so many others out there I should scan the news without having to scroll up and down.

I found the font to "sparse" (letters are too distant from each other) and therefore hard to read. The top black bar is too heavy and takes space from the front page. The "Latest" news (2nd row down the title) is way too small font.
All red headers/titles would come out easier to read and nicer if they were bolded. Presently one's sight "get lost" in the page looking for the titles. Also a black font would be easier to read than the light blue.
For the positive, I like the distribution of the pictures and topics and I found the gray footer with white text very elegant and relaxing.

how about the ability to change the background colour? Sometimes the white background is too bright...changing the colour or its tone/contrast would be great!

My first thought was that there is too much white on the page. Having to scroll down for such a long time to read the whole of a story is a bit aggravating.

My second thought was where has the link to the Weather gone?. And thirdly - where are the links to BBC radio and TV sites?

I use the BBC news front page as my entry page to the BBC website, but the news front page now seems completely disconnected from the rest of the BBC site.

Where's the link to the weather on the home page? I had to fish around other pages before I could find it.

Ian Sutherland

Great!

When you announced you were redesigning the news site, I was a little anxious. Thankfully it's now clear you've done the sensible thing and kept (most of) what worked, and simply refined and adapted for a wider layout. Phew! I had nasty visions of it turning into the Sky News website, but instead it has acquired that same nice spacious feel that made the recent CNN site redesign so successful.

My main criticism is one that I imagine stretches beyond BBC News - the black BBC header running across the top of every page. Does this really have to be so tall? It's just a logo, a search box and two links isn't it?

Perhaps the powers-that-be have plans for it. But as it stands, I can't see the reason, either functionally or aesthetically, and I really hope those responsible will consider reducing its height just a tad.

On the whole though, I'm pleased (and somewhat relieved) by what your designers and developers have done.

Thank you for all the work you put into the layout of the site. All the more reason to see it as my favourite site!
I really love the better use of the screen width. However, I agree with some above that the vertical space has become a bit too sparse. It takes more clicks to scroll down to Around the World, which is a section I use a lot.
Also, there is now only one heading per continent/area, whereas there were 2 before for most (or all). I prefer less space between lines plus more info to more emptiness. After all, we're used to line spacing as it is in these comments.
Maybe you could add an option where spacing can be set individually?

One final suggestion:
Since I live abroad, the change over hit me halfway through the morning. As it happens I'd closed down my computer and found the new layout upon restart. My first thought was that something had gone terribly wrong with my computer! Maybe you featured something recently that I'd missed, but it would help to have something at the top of the site (like "New" or "Improved" on commercial items)

Where oh where is the weather? And the localised news? I loved getting my local news at the touch of a button. That seems to have gone too!

Please put the weather link back on the front page and the tabs to each section of the site at the top. The black band at the top is unnecessary. Otherwise looks great.

Restored links to the weather (much used) and the local news /weather etc would be appreciated please!

Otherwise, I guess I'll get used to the new design in a few weeks as with anything. Onwards and upwards!

I'm sorry, but having navigated around the new layout for over an hour, I must say I much prefer the old compact format.

Navigating to the Around the World sections (which are still in the old format) was a relief.

With all the possible combinations of graphics cards and screen formats, the old layout seemed to work for the vast majority.

If it works ...........?

Bad design. It takes up far too much
real estate on the screen.

As several people have said, any competent
website designer lets the pages adjust
to the user's desired width (so far as
possible), rather than forcing them to
use a wide browser window leaving no space
for anything else.
The main content of the news pages, at least,
is just text - it should display happily
in a 200 pixel window if I ask it to.

I love it! Finally a new design that does not look like it's from the early 90s. And please make the photos larger! They have been tiny for a long time now..

Oh, and I realise not everyone in the world has a broadband connection but could you maybe have two versions?

The ability to customise the front page to add local news and local weather was great. Where has it gone?

You are right to worry about increasing the width of the site. I continually buy bigger monitors and upgrade my video to enable me to use Windows' facility to have more than one application visible. Now I will have to do so again. My screen "real estate" belongs to ME. It isn't there to be taken over by site developers who want to use every available pixel to pretty up their content!

Attention also needs to be paid to the prevalence of WIDESCREEN format displays that have a lower height to width ratio. Yes, it common now to have 1280 pixels across instead of 1024 (a 25% increase), but we might also have only 800 down instead of 968 (an 18% decrease). That means using less height, not just increasing the width. Instead, your designers have added another banner, further reducing the visible content when the page opens, and making us scroll more.

Finally, once again the BBC concedes to Microsoft. The new layout doesn't work properly in Firefox. If the designers developed and tested with Firefox, it would work in Internet Explorer - but the other way around often fails. It's logical to develop using the tool that restricts you most.

Whither the weather link??

Where are the links for the radio, TV, Where I live, the weather, etc? I find the page is not easy to navigate.

I agree with previous comments.

Where's the weather and where is our local news? I dont mind having the Asia-Pacific news on the front page but I'd quite like the ability (as in the old version) to find out whats happening in Kent and Sussex - which is my area.

It's just too long! On the old design I could see most of the headlines at one go; with this one, you have to scroll and scroll and scroll...

Sorry to have to add to the detractors. I have a high res monitor, still in old 4:3 ratio, so you'd think I'd like the new 'more open' design. Wrong! It looks more like a 'trendy' blog than a concise news website.

Endless scrolling is not my idea of usability. The excessively deep banners are a complete waste of screen real estate. I'd be even more frustrated if I'd moved to a widescreen monitor, especially as you don't allow adaptive widths.

I may like spacious cars and white space in adverts, but concise web pages rule. Why not provide the old look as a CSS option?

They must be reading. Weather now added :)

Horrible horrible horrible!

Too much white space, half the links we're all used to are gone and it all looks 'washed out'.

The 'low-graphics' version looks better!

Any chance of a button so we can choose to view it in the old style again?

It's definitely nicer visually, but from my point of view the change's reduced the site's usability. The fixed width is annoying. I'm used to having several programs open in unmaximised windows, and in different places on the screen. The fixed width, however, means I can't use the BBC website this way any longer (which means I'll have to look for a different news website, because much as I love the BBC, I'm not changing the way I work just to be able to use your website as my main news source).

And why have you gone down (on the International version) from having two headlines displayed under each section on the front page to only one? This's also affected the mobile version. Please bring back the second headline!

I don't like this new layout one bit, it's far too corporate, sparse and bland. The headlines don't stand out like they used to. Bring back the old one!

Extra width and a more whitespace in the page: much better!

The audio/video section, right in the middle of the page, is slightly annoying for those of us who never ever use it.

I unconsciously and automatically reloaded the page upon seeing the new BBC design. I thought I mistakenly hit a wrong site.

Upon understanding this is BBC's new design, the first thing came up in my mind is: What is this? Elderly-friendly design?

I agree with the saying white/blank space has a point. But that depends largely on its application or usage.

I personally find the new design rather wasted than cleverly use white space.

Now words are so apart, entries seem to break loose, and more scrolling down than ever.

I love the old compact design because all I need is pretty much within one click and on one screen.

Perhaps I am too young?! I have no patience for more scrolling downs and clicks?!

F. (Yokohama, Japan)

...but that's why the (old) BBC website was so good - it was nice and dense and you could see (and click) a lot on one page, and every single word clicked into somewhere else - truly efficiet!

The whole point of "windows" is that you have a non-maximised window, that you "tile"... With this new design, I can't read the whole page, and am constantly scrolling (and that's with the font size reduced)

Can't you offer an option which is denser? (or make it work with a smaller window?) People who want it spaced out can up the font size and maximise the screen

Did you do any market research? What did your user panel say?

Hmmm the local news box has now appeared since my previous blog post, so that's one issue addressed already. Here's hoping the other issues get resolved just as fast!

As Ian said above, THE FONT SIZES ARE ALL WRONG IN FIREFOX. I checked in IE and it's fine - please don't tell me that the BBC only tests its pages in IE.

My last "comment" addressed my fears and dissatisfaction with the BBC adding advertising to its website. Fortunately, either that idea never panned out and was intelligently discarded by management, or my Opera browser has exceeded even Opera's claims and successfully blocked advertising via second and third party Internet connections, as infamously used by Doubleclick and other purveyors of Internet "trash advertising."

Today, I am writing about your latest changes forced on loyal BBC readers: removal of customized weather (i.e. London) and up to 2 local News headline sections (i.e. Jersey and Guernsey); and a change from your definitive crisp black and blue font colors to what can only be described as Paris Hilton's "soft" blacks and blues.

On your BBC Q & A site, you write about your homepage saying:

"The BBC has launched a new version of its homepage

"The page now allows users to customise the page and includes new features such as TV schedules and live radio. All content that was available on the old version - such as the directory section, news headlines and weather forecast - can be found on the new page."

Sadly, this just isn't true. I can no longer customize ANYTHING.

Moreover, these softer touches of color (especially for font use) mixed with graphically drawn images rather than your trademark visually distinctive logo-like images, may work selling high fashion and cosmetics, but they are certainly *not* the world acclaimed "BBC Worldwide NEWS."

Once again I ask, why must the BBC always be focused on making changes just for change's sake, rather than expending all that time and money making your news products even better than they already are?

Please stop dilluting the BBC reputation. Return to your crisp and straight-forward style and BE PROUD OF IT!

And give me back my London weather and Jersey and Guernsey local News sections!

Thank you.

Richard Moore
Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA

What has happened to the option of having a link to the local news and weather? Please, please, please reinstate this on the home page!!

Also some of the type is too light - grey doesn't work well on websites - and it needs a slightly bigger text for the links to other sections eg Sport. Has anyone given consideration to those people whose sight is not what it was but don't want to have to reset IE to a larger text size.

Otherwise it's not too bad, and I'm sure we'll get used to it OK. It could have been a lot worse! (eg the awful Guardian redesign)

Just wanted to add another voice to the chorus requesting you bring back the tabs. The site is much harder to use without them.

Looks good - but why is the new wide look only on the main page, and not on subsequent pages?

I like the new style a lot, but the radio links returning would be good.

There's too much white space so it's necessary to scroll much more than before - a dreadful waste of space. There is also very little emphasis on section headings so the whole site blends together too much - Sport doesn't stand out at all like it used to (and should) and the sets of links lower down the front page aren't distinctive either (as well as taking about twice the space they should).

The good news here is that the layout still works on my preferred browser, which does not do CSS. In fact, it looks a bit better - I use 1024x768 screen.

One advantage of ignoring CSS is that all the text is in black Helvetica on a white background here. I would find blue (or any coloured) text very hard to read.

But why does the page have a fixed width anyway? It is easy to make a web layout fit any width of window. Many people use a web browser window that is much smaller than the monitor.

It seems to have lost readability, and appears to be following the current trend of 'design' being considered more important than usability. Visually there is very little distinction between headings, sub-headings and text. I am also one of the unlucky 5% who cannot now see the whole page width, but has to keep scrolling across the page, which doesn't help.
And where is the 'Local News & Weather'? This was one of the most useful elements for me.

Please lose the black bar. It's just wasting space. Full width would be better too.

Also have you tried printing a news story? Eck!

Weather is back in its usual place

Just because my screen is 1600 pixels wide (and has been for the last 9 years) doesn't mean I want web pages to be that wide. As I rarely open web pages to much more than a third of the width of the screen the right hand edge of the BBC page is cut off. However this seems to be mostly white space, so it's no great loss.

I hate it. You have confused design with readability. The point of a news site is to get information quickly and you cannot easily scan down a page with all that awful white space. The bottom half of the page is terrible. AND WHERE IS MY LOCAL NEWS AND WEATHER, I WANT IT BACK.

It's stupid and poorly conceived from a usability point of view. 20% of the screen is wasted with an unnecessarily wide banner, too much wasted space between items, too much scrolling required to view the page. Why not give your viewers a VOTE on the new design? If it remains as is i'll be moving to other sites for my news.

Ah glad to see the local panel has just reappeared, along with a link to the weather.

I would like to ask where is the link to "Where I live" and also to the weather.

I see the local news and weather is back, but not quite fitting in with the new design. Is this a result of the BBC actually listening, and the fastest response ever?

My first impression this morning was that somehow I had been changed to the Low-Res version, and it took several minutes of searching for the control to change it before I realised it was a 'new look'.

Too much white space, and the topic sections at the bottom are hard to see.

Also with all the white padding why doesn't it resize to my browser window? One reason I liked the BBC site was It didn't have an annoying horizontal scroll bar - and yes I do have a 1024 screen, but hate full screen browser windows.

page width is good

the line height (line spacing) is too much - it means lots of scrolling

the less dense appearance is also too open and the page loses clarity and looks less authoritative

I don't like the extra width. I'm one of the old school computer users that doesn't just maximise the current window to fill the screen. This lets me make use of the windowing system rather than just flipping between programs. The new layout means that the site takes up more space on my desktop and is less useful for me.

I don't like the wider page. I do most of my viewing at 1600x1200 resolution and 800 pixel width meant I could give half the screen width to the page and still have the same available for other uses. The wider page chews up too much of my screen real estate!

Also, how about an option to suppress the video and audio items on the page? I almost never follow these links and I would much rather not see them!

I was a bit surprised when I first saw the new look, but my overall impression is positive.

I would bet anything that when the old look was first rolled out (when was that? 2002? 2003?) there was the usual string of complaints, just as we are seeing now. We have had several years to get used to the compact format that's now being retired.

My guess is that most of the complaints are less down to objective comparisons of old vs. new, and more to do with the discord that inevitably accompanies the new and unfamiliar. People are comparing the new look against what they are used to, and anything not in its accustomed place will be marked down.

Give it a few weeks for the new look to bed in and for us to get used to it, and for the site designers to tweak it in response to valid criticism and suggestions, and we will wonder just what all the fuss was about.

I like it. Keeps things fresh and should stave off those "this is boring" feelings that gradually creep up on many users of a web site that doesn't change now and then.

Like others, I'd like to see the link to weather returning, plus the local news links.

I'm not keen on the double brand at the top of each page. Although it's only slightly taller than the previous version, the general spacing out of content means less is visible "at a glance". Giving up so much space to branding is rather wasteful IMHO. You don't feel the need to double brand you're radio or TV broadcasts so why do it on your web sites? BBC News is just that, you don't need to tell us it's BBC News from the BBC! Couldn't you find some way to integrate the two branding elements together into a single header?

Overall though this is of course an absolutely fantastic service and long may it continue.

The new design looks very good and makes it much easier to move around the pages. But there is one thing with the embedded video that I feel is a little inconvenient.

I have noticed that on the bbcarabic.com video loads automatically wasting my internet traffic. What if I just want to read text? Is it not possible to to provide a link on the side for those who want to watch or listen?

The new 'light' look is of course easier on the eye, but that also renders it easier on the brain. Instead of 2 stories per continent in 'Around the World Now' we now get 1 story - as if what we really prefer is 'news lite'. Many of us come to the BBC World Service for the international stories not covered by other infotainment channels. Surely WS should reflect the fact that it is funded by a block grant from the FCO and not be subsumed within a homogenous BBC 'brand'.

The new design is excellent. The old page design was also excellent, but designed at a time when the majority had small screen widths. Now that most people have wider screens, a new page size was sensible. I'm sure it is not an accident, that the new pages (homepage as well) are now better on small devices like phones and my iPod Touch.
My only grump, and it is just a personal taste thing, is that the pages are now centred. I prefer the fixed to the left hand frame that you previously used. I have never seen any point or advantage in centreing pages. A reviewer previous complains about the grey verticle lefthand strip, which is cause4d by his browser window being too wide and the page centreing.

To all the people complaining about the missing weather link: How hard is it to type "http://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/", follow the link from centre of the BBC home page or just bookmark the weather page?

Please lets have the old one back nice and smart. This is along the lines of tellytubbies. Too much space. It has been shown that too much white space is very bad for the eyes. Obviously the Beeb team never contacts psycologists when designing their pages! Just what THEY think what WE want. And where are all the old links at the top of the page direct to Radio?
Don't fix if it aint broke.

Jenny Seoul S.Korea (a BBC TV license payer)

The new pages are just too wide and deep, so I have to do lots of scrolling up and down or sideways to see the stories. There's also too much white space which doesn't help.

Could you put the clock thats on the BBC homepage in the top right corner of the news website? It'll be a nice addition and fill the empty space up there.

The new display style is fine - except I seem to find myself scrolling down rather a lot.

What's more important is the style of writing, when did full stops become replaceable by commas (see first sentence) - and when did it become acceptable to use a hyphen in the place of virtually anything??

Change for the sake of change springs to mind if it's not broken don't fix it. The site now looks cheap and sparse of content just like some other commercial news websites but they fill there blank spaces with adverts, sorry don't like it.

New site is a welcome improvement. Much cleaner, easy to read.

Basically, it looks like you took the old page, changed a couple of the graphics, and s-t-r-e-t-c-h-e-d it all out.

When you have a wider page, YOU SHOULD PUT MORE IN THE PAGE, NOT LESS!

Great website! In the space of about 15 seconds I found the weather link and local news box. Seems fine to me.

I hate the new design: the extra space between stories makes the page MUCH harder to read, and it takes a lot longer to scan it to see what I'm interested in. I also agree with those who ask why the width can't scale to the browser width, as with most websites: those (like me) who, for example, have a bookmarks pane open on the LHS of the screen now can't fit the whole site onto one page.

I the new look website will finally push me to look to another news site as my first point of call...

What to say? You did not ask me! What I see is change for the sake of change. The desire for someone to "make their mark". Change can be for the better...or for worse, in this case the latter applies. Overall the expanded view has lower text contrast so it is harder to read. There is less content on the front page so I miss more news if I don't click each category. Like many people, I don't have all day to read this (or any other) site.

It is what you did not change that is most needed, that is to IMPROVE you search capability! To be able to search by date(s), region, topic etc.

I like the new look. Aesthetics are good and colours do not tire the eye. Also take more use of my screen – but not fully. If you use flexi width, wide screen users like me will benefit more. Thanks.

Looks very nice. But can you please fix the font, it's really hard to read!

And why not go full width? It would then work well for users of large and small screns. About 90% of the Internet does this, why not the BBC?

I like it! I think it is a great improvement.

Oh yes, I like that. Much cleaner design, and it's now apparent how outdated the old design had become.

One thing, though... I'd like to see clearer, bolder links to the other BBC "top level" sites (Sport, Weather, TV, Radio etc).

Much too much white space makes the site more difficult to read, problems with spacing and css whereby pages don't quite fit together properly. Despite the site being wider I now have to scroll around more to read stories.

I used to prefer reading the main page rather than just RSS feeds but now the stories no longer stand out enough for it to be worth it.

BUT! I understand it is a work in progress, so you can fix these problems - just surprised such a beta version was released (it is a trend nowadays though!)

Please please loose the top black bar though, and reduce the white wasted space.

I don't like it :(
Just because I have a high res screen doesnt mean I want to surf the internet full-screen! (there is other stuff I want to do!)

As M Houlden says,
"Looks like a mess. I do have a high res screen (1280 pixels wide) but I don't have my browser filling the screen. There's a lot of wasted space..."

And why do we need breathing space? its a website! I much prefer the old syle where everything fits nicely.

Could you change the number of headlines in the international regions summary down the bottom of the page back to two each, or even possibly increase it to three... I don't like having to click on each section to constantly view them.

Otherwise the look is fresher than the old, but the ability to customise it to browser width would be good.

Awful.

Much harder to read, and I'm running a widescreen LCD.
Why not just expand to fit the browser window ?

Where's the weather, and local links etc ?

Please put it back the way it was.

Here's hopefully a constructive suggestion...

I often either don't want to watch a video item (or can't), but still want to see what that item of news is about. It would be helpful if, as well as having a 'watch' link, there could be a link to the text version of the story if available.

I would also suggest, as a future enhancement to the new design (which incidentally, I think looks great), would be that you redesign the underlying HTML structure of the page to use less tables, and the have a well defined set of class names and ids, and then it would be relatively easy to restyle the page and have alternative views available - such as a view which fits to the width of the window, or one with less line spacing.

More breathing room = unused white pixels on the screen. Not liked.

Smaller, grey text = less readability. Not liked.

"Post Comment" link didn't work in Firefox, had to switch to Internet Explorer. Not liked.

0/3. Sorry but I don't think its an improvement for me as a user. (And I don't really care that the journalists do like it, they're not the audience.) Is the BBC brave enough to put a vote for or against the new look on the site, say in a week?

Can we go back to the 1998 design? It was no-nonsense, distinctive and very British. It suited the BBC far more than a "visual style". Must everything be converted to a passive, spoon-feeding, "visual" common demoninator? What about the importance of the content for people who can, and want to, think? A return to traditional BBC values would be best - impeccable reputation for bias-free coverage (this sounds laughable these days), quality writing, accuracy, and something that, as broadcasters, you just don't seem to get: correct spelling and grammar. I don't think the BBC has any idea what all those schoolboy howlers are doing to the BBC's "professional" image.

I was so surprised to see the changes this morning, looks kind of strange to me, well the only thing permanent in life is change, but I think the Headlines text on the top bar of the home page should be bolder like it used to be.

Intensely dislike the new design, the bottom half of the page is dead space, and the top half looks like every other web 2.0 site on the internet (and as a result makes it feel like you've simply deployed one of the many freely available open-source content-management systems).

The old BBC news had an iconic feel to it -- why try and jump on the web 2.0 bandwagon?

Excellent new look.

Too much header, too much white space between lines of text, too much white space everywhere else.

Yes people have bigger screens now, with bigger resolutions but it doesn't mean we want to use all our pixels on the one website window. We use windowing OS' these days you know, everything isn't maximised on a big screen.

Generally, great stuff. A few tweaks do need to be made, as have been suggested above, but definitely heading in the right direction.

The most important change is to make the article text BLACK not grey, as it's hard to read.

BBC news has been my browser home page for over 5 years. But probably not for much longer. The new design is far to hard to read and digest quickly - too much vertical scrolling now required to view the whole page, and the extra width just takes up more screen space to show less content.

A pointless and ill-thought-out change for the sake of change.

The new layout is just TOO wide and TOO airy - I now see much less content, and have to scroll an awful lot more - and this is supposed to be an improvement?

Compare:
News front page at 1042 BST: I can see 160 words of content, excluding the permanent sidebars.

Old UK new page: I can see 188 words.

That's a 15% reduction in visible content, despite a WIDER page!

The mastheads are too big, and too much wasted space between lines - the spacing was therefore much better on the old site...

As by your own admission, many of those you asked told you to leave it alone and not to change, then why did you go ahead and change it anyway ?
What's the point of all the new space between the lines ? It just means more scrolling down and less information on screen at any one time.
Change for the sake of change again ?
If it ain't broke,...

Overall, I like the new look. However, it's disappointing that the extra space created by the wider page has been used almost entirely for the sidebars. The article width has increased by only 10%, while the left and right sidebars are now 33% and 40% wider, respectively. This seems, to me, to be proritizing navigation over content.

What is that black banner across the top of the page? About a third of my screen is taken up with banners! Not a good change.

It's a shame that instead of using a redesign to improve the amount of content (especially user-selected content), you have just taken some of what was there before and spread it out more.

Specific issues - like many others, yes, I have a 1024px screen, no, I don't want BBC news taking up all of it. Like many users above, I do do other things on my computer as well as checking this website. You've designed a site that can be used in 95% of computer screens at the moment, but what about in 3 years time (or less), as more and more people use portable (smaller) devices to browse the web? It REALLY isn't that hard to design a page that expands to fit browser width. Furthermore, you actually haven't used the extra width for much more than white space - so why annoy your users in this way?

White space is all very pretty, but when it takes me twice as long to scan down the page as before, it's not so good. The spacing between articles in the second half of the page is particularly bad.

Readability is obviously an issue. I'm not quite sure what possessed you to make the text less easy to read - but as someone without a visual impairment, I'm already struggling this morning and I've only been on the site a few minutes. The main problem is the colour, but there is also insufficient distinction between headings, sub-headings and text, and some of the font sizes are really messed up - the bullet pointed text in this article http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7321354.stm , for instance, are stupidly tiny.

I do love BBC News, and won't be going anywhere else - but only because of the standard of your news, not because of the redesign. It'll settle in over time, but you clearly still have many issues to sort out.

Finally, it would have been nice if you could have introduced a bit of customisability into the redesign - you did it with the main BBC page, so why not let users get the content they want here?

Good work on the redesign. I can remember all the past redesigns and they always came as a shock at first, but I like what I see.

I like the new extra whitespace, but in places I think there is now a little too much and could be tweaked a little. A good example of this is in the section "AROUND THE UK NOW". In particular, between headings such as "ENGLAND" and "New parking rules come into force" there is too much whitespace - it looks like there is an unnecessary blank line.

Similarly for "other top stories". If there is a list of headlines, reduce the white space and that will make the stories look cleaner and stand out more.

I would also consider putting the headings that are in CAPS, such as "AROUND THE UK NOW" into bold, and tightening up headers and footers, more in keeping with the old style.

Looks very good — the only thing I'd change is the area at the bottom where news categories are listed with one top item under each. All those spaces between lines make it harder to scan and pick out relevant content — having the same space between each headline and its connected news story is too much.

A commenter above hits the nail on the head - style chosen over clarity and compactness. Increasing the width should have been enough to decrease the density of text; instead you now have to scroll forever to get to what you want, losing the at-a-glance summary of all news. Going down to just one headline for each country of the UK and each world region is retrogressive. And what have we gained in return? Monolithic title bars to "strengthen the corporate identity" - was that part of the revamp really to benefit the reader, or just to show the designers are fluent in management-speak?

Ouch! The increased spacing of the layout means the page is harder to read and looks disorganised as a result. And as many have mentioned it means more of my valuable desktop is taken up to see the same content.

The grey bar at the top adds nothing - the two links and search box could easily be moved into the red bar.

There is little difference in colour between new and visited links. In fact everything now looks like a visited link.

Yep....Tony Hayes was right.....we evolve to revolve.....or something like that?!

I like the space, but I think the lower half of the page has a little too much of it. Apart from that, keep up the good work!

I quite like the new look, but is there any chance of the underlying HTML to get at least vaguely closer to the XHTML 1.0 Transitional it's claiming to be?

The W3C's HTML validator reports 378 errors for the front page alone - many of which would be incredibly easy to fix.

Even just changing the doctype to the older HTML 4.01 Transitional would take the number of errors down to 75. Currently, it's claiming to be in one dialect, when it's actually far closer to another.

Keeping to standards doesn't just make things easier to maintain, it would also get rid of the bizarre formatting errors currently visible on some pages in non-Internet Explorer browsers. Tiny-text paragraphs followed by normal sized ones? Yes...

This is a sad day. What a nuisance to have to move back and forth across the screen. Who needs all of that white space? I like BBC and even trust it most of the time, but I ask you to remember that all movement is not change and all change is not progress.

At last you shocked me!Nearly thought your site had been hijacked.Sorry I hate the new design,have to scroll more to read the news,plus this gigantic masthead wasting space,and the width of my screen is not filled anymore.Don't want it to breathe, want it to blurp out as much information as possible.Other changes are fine with me.Please please consider once again!

If its not broken don't fix it, change for change sake is not always welcome. Not and improvement I'm afraid.

P.S. You also seem to have only specified the verdana font for the body of your entire site, meaning Linux users without the font installed will be seeing the site with their default browser font (serif in most cases). I imagine this is incorrect, and you preumably want to change this so you give a generic sans-serif fallback for users without verdana.

No I don't like it!!! Bring back the old style page which was packed with information and looked like a broadsheet with lots of different news to read. I loved it!

Now the BBC site just looks like all the rest ~ boring and sparse and news and information doesn't jump out at you and it's more difficult to scan.

By all means add some width as we all use bigger screens now, but don't water down your look and feel.

This especially applies to the additional news pieces which were lists of links which were nice and compact before, and are now loose and vague.

So width = yes and additional space = no!!

One further thing - the lines (and text) in the three columns doesn't align. This looks incredibly messy and unprofessional.

I do like the new look website. The inclusion of advertisements for international viewers however is an indication that the BBC is in danger of losing its position as a global independent voice.

I agree with the fixed-width design; have users of large monitors actually tried reading 1600-pixel wide lines of text (gives the neck muscles a workout I guess!)

Not so happy about the wide line spacing; makes it harder to read and, as others have said, leads to more scrolling.

The red imagery is a very strong feature of the BBC's graphics on TV and online; the deep, black band at the top seriously detracts from this. Could not the search box and accessibility links be subtly incorporated in the red masthead? Something like this: http://www.seume.net/BBCNews.jpg

Again, as with other commentators, please reinstate the links to local news; surely the omission was an oversight rather than a design decision.

Overall, though, BBC News is a site I always refer to several times a day and I can't see that changing!

I see Weather hiding down there under "related sites" ... so that's passable, but could be improved.

I'm not so crazy about the grey body text. That makes the site look weak, not like an authoritative source of news.

The wider view is not so great, either. I agree with all the comments here about non-maximized windows.

Thankfully, there is still a low-graphics view on offer, which has two great features: black text, and a fully fluid width. Next time, consider revamping the site design with a fluid width.

Being a designer makes me appreciate how much trouble went into this new design, which seems like an unnecessary waste considering that a new design wasn't desperately needed. Thanks for everyone's hard work, however. I think with a few tweaks this design could come to be well-liked by many visitors.

Where is the 'home' tab which used to be along the top of the page?

Way, way too much white space. Web sites don't need it, people want information not a design class. Type face too thin. I preferred the old layout, which you should have retained with the new features added.

Well done - a huge improvement! Perhaps a shade too much vertical space between links, but overall - thank you for improving the best news site.

I agree with many other concerning the disappearance of the weather link. Also about the fact that the new spacious appearance, whilst looking good, means that I have to scroll down to even see the second story on the page, which although there are bigger things to worry about is a bit annoying!

The black banner at the top might help continuity across the whole site, but on the news website it now looks clumsy with two banners.

Altogether it is an improvement, but still needs working on.

Not happy with the new look page i think it is bland and too much has been changed in one go, think you will be losing some hardened users in the near future. I for one will be searching elsewhere from now on as this morning was a nightmare trying to navigate. Why is it that when something works perfectly fine one has to go and change it and not neccessarily for the better. If you had rec'd many complaints about the old layout then fair enough but i feel their is no balance in the changes that have been made.

Your Sincerely

AN UNHAPPY EX-USER

Utterly hopeless. The most useful space on the page/screen is the top-most area and this has been used to show not just one useless block of colour but two. It's a ludicrous waste of screen 'real-estate', which means the reader has to unnecessarily scroll down the page *every time they read it*. How stupid is that?

Shouldn't be long before someone writes a Firefox add-on to remove all that junk, and return the site to some semblance of usability.

And all that extra screen width? Also completely wasted.

The user now has to use their mouse twice as much to access the same visual content.

Someone should be sacked for introducing what represents a usability basket case.

Thi morning I clicked onto the BBC News website to catch up on my daily news as usual and Wow!
I like it :-)
It is so refreshing and bright, well done BBC.

Hi! Still getting used to the new look - I'm sure I will in time. BUT: Where is the link to the BBC Radio pages??

It's a shame the new look is spoilt by poor coding resulting in pages where the font keeps changing size.

I move frequently between the International and UK version during the day. Now it is more difficult. It has moved from the top of the page (above News Front Page) right to the bottom. It does seem strange that a re-designed site should make things harder for the user.

It's a nice update but two not so minor issues...

What's with the double header? What's the need for a big black bar and then a big maroon header bar - it's just pushing the meaningful content further down my screen. (See next point) Surely these two could have been combined is a graceful way.

I'm sure I need to scroll more to actually bring the news into full view now - this seems to be a step backwards.

Hoping you address the scrolling issues...

Fixed width is a poor choice. Agreed that web page fills the screen but only if you run your browser full screen. No good if you don't or use a small screen laptop.

Why can't you have a dynamic width that will fit available screen width?

A lovely new design that's spoiled by the extremely pale colour scheme - nothing stands out making it very hard to pick things out on the page!

Fix it!

It may look better at a glance but from a readability perspective I am finding it *a lot* harder to scan the front page for stories to read, due to the extra spacing and centered design.

The ratio of the width third column on the homepage to the width of the middle column is wrong and distracting - the third column should be made narrower.

I don't mind the refreshing change in colours but at least make it as easy to scan as it was before!

Now I can't keep another window on top and off to the right, because BBC now wants all the screen for itself! Why? Just to show me blank space on the left.

I like the new look, but the Lufthansa advert is covering the news items on the RHS of the UK frontpage. VERY irritating.

Put me in the "unimpressed" box. It now feels like the BBC is on PDA, with so many scrolls to read 1 article. The spacing both vertical and horizontal feels childish, and I'm curious to see what it does to the accessability options.
White space is being praised above as being really useful on a page, but isnt it just another word for blank? Scroll all the way down to the "around the world/uk" at the bottom of the main page, it looks very very bare down there.

Sorry, I don't like the "new" website at all. I say "new" because it's not actually new. All the same menus and content are there, all in the same places. But there are huge areas of whitespace everywhere, and the text is twice the size it used to be, all meaning that what used to fit in one page now takes four.

Please put it back the way it was!

Did nobody test this in Firefox? Taking a peek at it in IE6, it's clear FF development was an afterthought at best.

I must say I was rather disappointed in the site 'refresh.' I find there is far too much white space, which works against 'more information faster.' I liked the old site design because I could very quickly get not one but several of the top stories throughout the world and throughout the BBC website.

All the extra white space means that not only do I have to work harder to find out the top headlines (key here plural), but that I have to visually hunt even for the single headline information that is now displayed.

Please bring back the old design! (or at least get rid of the dreadful whitespace and display more headlines per category)

I like what i see, save for a few things. I think the feature articles on the right have too much room, compared to the main stories in the center. It seems like the main content is squished slightly in the middle.

Also i find the text colour to be slighly.. off. The blue seems to make everything blend into one.

As for the black masthead.. why have it, if there's nothing on it? Surely it would be served better by having the the old links up there.

But well done on opening it out a lot!

I like the increased white space but there is just so much of it now that it makes it harder to get an overview of a page of different stories. The two BBC banners don't help this by taking up about 1/5 of my fairly standard sized screen.

It is a very good starting point but some more work is needed to realise the clarity and usability of the old design, with the freshness of this one.

Too much white. Hard on the eyes. Preferred the previous version and the different colours for the links, e.g. yellow for sport, made it it a lot easier to get around.

I've turned the brightness waaaaay down and I can still feel a headache coming on...

230 comments by 10.49 must mean yuo have mnade an impression. I think it is a positive redesign other than I can't see how I now get back to the BBC Home page as we were able to do previously? there should be a link along the navigator bar or some where please

I come to a news site to read news,

as much and as quickly as I can,

but now all I see too much white

space around everything. I don't

know of any other site that wastes

soo much space.

I would rather have twice as much

news in half the space please.

Don't get me wrong, I believe this

is one of if not the best website

in the World, but I respected the

site for its content, not blank

space.

I hope the BBC do not start

broadcasting white space on the TV.

Please please, more links, more

content, more news - not less.

Thank you.

PS - I hope all those spaces made

that easier to read.

Horrible. Most of what I can see on the front page now is not actually news.
Sorry to see you have falen for the current media trend for 'white space' and 'clean design' instead of a useable and informative news website. That is, after all, what we come here for.
The BBC websites have never really been great designs, but they at least allowed you to see the content easily. This is the worst design of the lot, and even makes it difficult to do what you came here to do.

Ironically, while the homepage catapaults me unwillingly into a vacuous and white space-infested future, clicking on the 'Asia-Pacific' link in the sidebar sends me equally unwillingly back into the past - 8th July 2002 to be precise. Help!

Like the style but agree with others that there's too much white space now. Whereas before I could see the whole frontpage in one screen I now have to scroll down to see all. Also why can't the Most Read tab be shown first instead of Most E-mailed? What people read is more relevant I thought then what they forward to friends.

As a reader from the US who has switched over to BBC for news entirely as the majority of news outlets in this country are dreadful, overall I like the new look of the site. The one thing that does bug me is the section for geographically specific headlines has been dropped to one link per section from two. Generally I drop in to scan the front page, get an overview of major stories and usually only go one click deep. I've liked the ability to see the two top stories from different parts of the world without having to click into each section. An extra click might not seem like a big deal even to someone who doesn't have a ton of time, but multiply that extra click by six sections and it does add up.

Actually, looking now at the Science section, which seems to have the original look, in the framing of the new, i think i prefer it that way. The text is readable and it just seems to hang together better even with the font colour still being so blue on them.

I think the front page needs to be more in keeping with the others, not the other way around.

The new layout makes the site easier to read, with it looking less cramped and it makes the links easier to spot and follow.

For me it works really well and I am using Firefox with KDE desktop running in Linux (not Microsoft Windoze). I guess though, its going to be one of those occasions when you can please some people some of the time but not everyone all of the time!

Hard to read. Not enough contrast for the text. It also needs hard ruling between the articles - just like a newspaper!

I like the fact that the layout is not so cramped. However, I would prefer one that expanded to the width of the browser, rather than fixed at a large size - for example, my dad uses a lower resolution to see everything better - and he now has to scroll to read the site which is disappointing for him.

I like the bigger size better - although I feel a little lost - would like more "borders" and boundaries, so that the edges are more clearly defined and don't blur at the edges into some vast desert scene with the white space.

Brave of you to redesign the site, but please - too much white space, and the site works only with a maximised browser on 1024x768 (most laptops). The site should use CSS with variable width columns to flex with browser width, and should allow a denser single-spaced formatting to make better use of laptop screens.

Urgh, I may still be in shock over your new design, and it is quite pretty, but I'm also in agreement with the above comments saying you have used far too much white space. One of the things I liked most about the previous setup was the ease with which you could scan news stories from the main screen, now I have to scroll up and down just to check all the headlines! Please provide an option to have the more concise layout back!

The new design is MUCH TOO WIDE - I dislike having my browser fill the whole screen, and I usually have more than one window on the screen at a time - so please fix this, and reduce the width to something more practical. That's the major defect - the minor ones are that you've gone overboard with the spacing, the colour scheme make the site a little *less* readable and the navigation seems less clear.

The new design looks clean, but is actually less user-friendly than the old one. It requires more scrolling, owing to the increased space it occupies. Also, the old design was intended for users who kept open the favourites/bookmarks sidebar, and therefore wanted a narrower format. I now have to close the sidebar to look at the BBC web pages. Is it not possible to adjust the page content to fit the available window?

I agree a change was needed and in many ways it looks better but I'm a bit underwhelmed.

I just want to add my voice to those complaining about the two bars at the top, much too big and without any links on it. What's the point having 2 banners?

I do NOT like it one bit. A rude shock!
Why did you have do this?! Not happy.
Totally flawed design. Looks really airy-fairy. Simply too much space, headlines not stark enough and the sports section is hard to find. I can't for the life of me fathom why you resolved to change the old version! The old style was great. It was compact and easy to read and navigate. Out with the new and in with the old!

Please undo the change. This isn't an update. It's badly laid out and harder to read. Why change things when they aren't broken.
Please please please go back.
Richard

This is horrible. You've chosen to increase white space, but at the loss of any usability.

The sidebar that links to other articles about a big news story has grown in size and decreased in having a purpose.

I now have to scroll to see "My Local News" box, and the generally more spread out look means that I can no longer get a grasp of the days news in one glance, I have to scroll and pan around instead. And I'm using a bigger screen than you've designed for.

This is really really poor. I hope the refinements in coming weeks improve things significantly, because I don't like reading the news here now.

Too much vertical scrolling is needed; it makes it much harder to "speed read".

This "The Editor" blog page is the perfect example of compact, readable "Comments" - following an article that is so spaced out that I need to go and stand on the other side of the room to read it.

There seems to be an issue on some pages. The text just to the left of some of the images embedded in a news article seems to be displayed at a smaller font. Example here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/7322106.stm

I'm using Firefox 2.0.0.13 on Vista.

This is NOT an improvement.

Yet another fixed width BBC news site update! It's straightforward to design a site like this so that it simply fills the available width in the browser window. That is the Right Way, and fixed width is the Wrong Way! (At work my display is 1920 pixels wide. Elsewhere I browse using displays as narrow as 320 pixels. 1024 pixels wide is completely inappropriate for both of those!)

Is there any way we can use our own CSS to retain some of the look and feel of the old design? In particular to stop the page being centred instead of left-justified?

I use multiple windows on a widescreen laptop. I've compared the content of today's UK and International News home pages - the UK design takes up much more space for the same information. Isn't it possible as part of your accessibility work to allow us more control over how content is presented?

I'm afraid I didn't see the request for input on a new design - or I would have voted for no change. You had a great design before - it really stood out among news organizations - and I know how much work you had put into it.

Please let those of us with good display technology and good eyesight (and btw I am very far from being a teenager!) make use of them :)

While it look's much fresher - there's way too much scrolling needed (which I appreciate is a bit contradictory). I look at the homepage loads and it's really going to annoy me.

You can't get the immediate overview in a single glance in the way that you could before.

The text on the home page is harder to read. I liked the old format. Can the text be restored to its previous colour?

The old site was looking tired, but this isn't an improvement.

It looks a bit vacant and the huge gaps between lines are rather "Janet and John". Evidence of dumbing-down?

The top banners are just a waste of space taking up about 20 per-cent of my screen; the link to the weather would be nice to have back, even if the forecasts were always wrong and changed by the hour. My final gripe: why doesn't the width of the content adjust to the width of the browser window? Having it fixed-width is a bit 1995.

The new look is nice, but let me add my voice to the multitudes above that complain about the fixed width.

It is annoying, like most everyone I have a horizontal resolution >= 1024 on all my computers but why oh why should I need to have my browser window maximised. Please, please, please BBC - move to a flexible width!

Oh, yes, I also hope you can fix the font problems on Firefox but that is a minor annoyance in comparison.

"But we now reckon that 95% of you have your screen resolution set to 1024 pixels or wider"

Congratulations on looking at the site statistics package. Now tell us how you came to the conclusion that all of those people open their browser at full-screen?

My screen is currently 1152 pixels, yet the new layout is too wide for me.

I DO like the new more airy look.
I think the more glossy appearance is no better or worse than the old version.
I DON'T like the ridiculously large black search bar at the top of the screen. When I open the website only two-thirds of the page actually has any news in it - the rest is full of banners and headings.
I also DON'T like the more prominent video and audio section. I make no use of this whatsoever. Please can we have a version of the page with no video or audio.

Jo, London, UK

I hate it! Everything's so big it's like reading a children's book! And when you click on to a related page the page is in the old size (much better!), so you're constantly having to adjust your screen. Whoever thought this was a good idea is an idiot.

Epic fail.
I can now see less on a screen than I did before and all that spread out white space makes this really hard to read. Too much wasted space.
Why not give users an option of layouts? I think you'd find we would vote with our feet.

I like the new fresh look. However I think the black banner at the top looks out of place and it tends to detract from the fresh look of the rest of the page.

This was a classic case of 'if it isn't broken don't fix it'. The old website appearance was excellent; the new is significantly worse. The balance of text and white space is not pleasing to the eye. There was great merit in the spatial conciseness of the old design. Why can't you just leave things that we like alone?

Like the new style, very good indeed, but one problem....I am reading the site from overseas and the adverts cut overlaps the text on the from the right, so I cannot see what I'm clicking. I'm using 1024x786 resolution. I dont mind the ads as long it doesnt block my navigation.

Other than that, good job!

Cheers.

SC.

It's good, cleaner and wider, but only if I turn my browser's text size one notch (Firefox on XP). Only then is the text comfortably readable in the main content as the text size and line height are a little too big.

Elsewhere the links to related articles, most read, Around the World now, etc... have too much space above and below them to be easily scanned. Previously the small & close text was easier to pick through and different enough from the main content.

And the top BBC banner takes up a good deal of real-estate, and the BBC link is as easy to click as the BBC News logo to go back to the home page. If the black BBC header was thinner it'd be better.

Good work & congratulations. I know what updating an international news web site feels like and how stressful it can be!

It does not look that bad in IE6.
It DOES look very bad in Firefox 2.0.0.11. The fonts are too small in Firefox.
PLease, please, please fix !
I don't want to use IE just for the bbc news.

BBC Online is a great read because of the interesting features on the Magazine index and elsewhere. They appear to have disappeared in the new design in favour of a load of white space. Newspaper websites however make a great deal of their features as it's the best writing. Why not do the same?

Do you go to the BBC news page for "whitespace" or information?

I now have to hunt around, using the scroll bar, for information. That means usability is worse.

I miss the quantity of information I used to get in one screenful.

In all honesty, I think the new design is awful. It has lost its classy BBC look, and looks much closer to other ordinary sites. I am regular reader of BBC, and I was shocked when I saw this new site. Can we please bring back the old layout ?

Too spaced out and soft coloured. The Times website made the same mistake and lost lots of viewers. Have to scroll much more now

I agree with comments 11 and 20, in particular – and all of the others expressing problems with readability.

There is too much wasted space on the page, and it is harder to digest lots of info quickly and easily. Like Neil (157), I assumed some "low res" version had kicked in.

If a previous design worked, and worked well, it is not resistance to change to simply state that as a fact.

New handling of video content is good, but the black bar must go! Please – prioritise more info / links, with emphasis on ergonomics in a smaller space. Could you at least provide an option to choose a more compact view?

Not a good move. Some improvements, but the text is now too large and too faint, there's too much unused space, scrolling is needed for everything, and the side panels are too wide. It doesn't differentiate enough between different areas on the page and the two top banners occupy too much space. I prefer a more compact delivery where I can see at a glance what is useful/interesting. The new design will waste a lot of time. I'll probably be using it less.

Why so big?!?

Do your researchers bother using the website for themselves??? Seriously.

It's rubbish, rubbish, rubbish.

Too much scrolling involved.

With laptops becoming more popular, your judgement on "use of space" is flawed.

It's too spaced out.

Please fire yourselves.

I don't like the new look - the black bar at the top takes up space unnecessarily, and I dont like the additional white space added. Plus it looks like the default font size has been increased - this is a mistake. I shouldn't have to change the settings in my browser just for a specific webpage

The visual style does look better, but one of the main reasons I use BBC news online is (or was) the efficient layout - the ability to see a complete overview of all the news stories on one screen.

Now only half of the front page content is above the fold, and I'm running on 1280×1024!

Great if you want to look like MSNBC. And all the others.
Like 24/7 TV news everything looks like everything else.
Your previous layout was classic. This isn't.

Don't like the way you cannot access the Radio section like before.

Prefer the new look, but give us the same kind of access to the Radio channels and the ifno they offer rather than just open up a little box for you to listen from.

Talking about picture sizes, I think pictures are still too small. Considering that you have limited space available in which to fit pictures, why not make them 'clickable' so that the user can view a bigger picture? You have done this occasionally for some pictures, but it should be much more common.

Not a fan of the changes. One thing I liked with the previous version was that all of the headlines were visible on the home page without needing to do any vertical scrolling. With the added white space, you can not see any of the headlines below the 'videos' without scrolling the page. That makes it harder to scan the results. The extra width also isn't used for anything except to make the text and spaces bigger. I liked the more compact version of the previous page which, perversely, was easier to read and scan for key information.

The new whitespace is wasted space, it just slows me down when I'm trying to read quickly.

The centralised page is also pretty annoying, because now I've got a page floating in between loads of wasted space.

It's all just so spread out, sprawling, and inefficient.

Please, for the sake of us who don't care about how "open" and "fresh" things look, bring back the efficient, functional, bbc news website. A third Graphics version would quite easily do this.

Please BBC!

First impression: text is harder to read, maybe because of font and lightness? banner at top overwhelms the page; wider page is ok but I never felt constrained before.

I'm afraid to say that I thought the old front page was a model web page: compact, efficiently laid out, and colorful. Now the impact feels . . . dispersed.

Sorry!

Looks great. Perhaps a bit *too* much space for the "Around the UK" links. Also the top banners do not line correctly with Firefox - that's got to be sorted!!

To be frank, I'm not impressed with this new look BBC News website. The space that some have been calling for and which has obviously been delivered does nothing for the looks of the site, with large wasted spaces, epecially under the main story picture(!).

Whatsmore, the functionality has been affected too! Instead of having everything accessible on one page, free of excessive scrolling, the site forces you to work to find the local news - the result will be less people looking there and, like myself, searching for alternative sources for online news. A great shame considering the old format worked fine! It appears as if the old addage, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" has been ignored once again....

Nope - I do not like it. The reasons have already been given above. Please add my vote of no confidence.

As a web designer myself, I would have been very proud to have come up with your new look.

Good job!

Sparse - wasted space. The new News page is HUGE!

In a time when each day brings even MORE news and when devices are smaller and smaller screened, why oh why would you expand the white and cut down on the news links?

Lazy is the description that springs to mind......

The page no longer fits properly on my laptop screen without a horizontal scroll bar, which is a real annoyance...the design looks quite nice though, but it will take a lot of getting used to.

Where's all the news gone???? Until yesterday, I could log on and see thirty headlines in one glance. Now it's all empty space! Seeing as you were re-designing the site, you could have included the option to personalise the front page. At least then those of us (like me) who don't want to see video or know that other people are e-mailing year-old stories could get on with reading today's news.

Well a great "improvement" NOT. I work for an American based comapny and use their VPN and therefore as far as the BBC are concerned have a foreighn IP address, so get to see the adverts! Generally not a problem as I'm pretty good at ignoring them, that is until they actually hide part of the page. Today on going to the Business page I get a glorious advert for a Middle East based airline that covers the right side of the page, as far as I can tell there's no way of minimising the ad or turning it off, so I loose content. Well done the BBC.

You don't say what % the 'many' represented, but you seem to have ignored the suggestion of 'leave it alone'. I endorse the "if it ain't broke...." brigade, and the multitaskers too.
Excessive scrolling - especially on home pages - is one of the most frequent complaints I hear when discussing website designs.
The purpose of the home page is surely a sort of sophisticated menu - here's what's on offer, in a few headlines - click to read more. That's gone - I use 1280x1024, and even on this it needs nearly three screens to display your home page - major step backwards.

I liked the old BBC News site due to its compact yet accessible design.

Many of us access the site from work - the new design fills up the screen obtrusively with too much padding and oversized bars and white space.

If it's just a new CSS stylesheet, please give us back the option of a more compact design.

Otherwise I shall have to create a 'site-scraping' script to give me back my BBC News in a convenient form !!

Don't like the new page since there is to much white space. To wide and to long!

You no longer see all the main ares of the home page without scrolling. To much scrolling for a home page is BAD!

Need to shrink it by little. OK! Change is required to keep a site fresh, but you have got in wrong.

Thanks

Andrew

BLEARGH is my comment on the new layout. Also, even before the new layout, the Local News functionality on the UK home page had stopped working. I'm using IE6 with WinXP and an error appears in the status bar when I enter my postcode.

The new banner is far too wide. The logo is ridiculous. I like the spacing across the width of the page, but it's too spaced out down the length of the page. Why do you have to feel you justify our licence fees by messing with things when they're not broken?

At a glance, it looks pretty enough. However, I feel the increased spacing is excessive (would it be possible for the amount of spacing to scale with the window size?) and I see no reason for having grey text instead of black. Surely reducing the foreground-background contrast impedes readability.

Sucks !! Bigtime !!

No longer my start page.

Where's all the news gone???? Until yesterday, I could log on and see thirty headlines in one glance. Now it's all empty space! Seeing as you were re-designing the site, you could have included the option to personalise the front page. At least then those of us (like me) who don't want to see video or know that other people are e-mailing year-old stories could get on with reading today's news.

Hmmm... While some of the new design looks cleaner, the wider minimum width is a pain. It means that I often end up having to scroll left and right, and that makes a site much less readable.

Note that, just because my screen is wider than X, it doesn't mean I will always have my browser windows set to use all that width. A good design would allow the extra width to be used if the reader made it available, but would not insist on having that extra width. In this, the new design fails.

The fixed page width has annoyed me for a while, after all this is a dynamic medium not a newspaper. It seems to me an opportunity to adopt this has been missed in this refresh.

I'm also really going to miss the links to other bbc sites that used to live at the top of the page.

Here's a list of changes I've made using the Firefox extention "Stylish"

1) Removed the BBC top bar - takes up far too much room compared to old.

2) Made the right hand column smaller, giving more room to the stories.

Make of that what you will, but in the main, I love the new site.

I don't like it. It's too sparse and gives too few headlines in the bottom section. There is only one headline for each section whereas there used to be two and there are fewer 'most read' headlines too. Not a good move.

Looks more like a common blog than the website of the most highly respected news service in the world, with a long, noble and meritous tradition.

I got a shock when I opened up the site this morning. However it is a welcome change. Visiting the site several times per day the old site was tiresome.

To improve you could make use of more bold font, as I feel at the minute it is too hard to distingusih between the important and not so important stories. I also think the blue font should be a little deeper, because it almost dissappears into the white it is so bright. Then if it is a story you have read then it becomes even lighter, which is annoying.

Good look though!

* At 11:30 AM on 31 Mar 2008,
* John wrote:

Is there any way we can use our own CSS to retain some of the look and feel of the old design? In particular to stop the page being centred instead of left-justified?

JOHN: Use Stylish for Firefox to create custom CSS.

Here's a list of changes I've made using the Firefox extention "Stylish"

1) Removed the BBC top bar - takes up far too much room compared to old.

2) Made the right hand column smaller, giving more room to the stories.

Make of that what you will, but in the main, I love the new site.

Doesn't work very well on my iphone. There's a big empty column down the right-hand side. Looks like the width is getting miscalculated.

This means I have to manually zoom to make the site readable, which I didn't have to do before.

I really dislike the "more space to breathe" The page looks sparse and ugly. I loved the old site. This new version is harder to read and has less content to the page. What a shame.

I find the new site very straining on the eyes. The greys and blues are not as clear as the old black and white. White space has just been moved to the left of the screen. Can we not choose our own version?

Some parts of it are nice -- the new masthead and graphics use are very good, and the main news box looks fine (all the way down to the grey Features box). But the right hand side and everything below it is just wasting tons of space -- there is now far too much whitespace and it makes the page far less legible than its predecessor.

I appreciate the fact that you are going for a gradual evolution rather than radical overhaul. The thing I like about the bbc site is the simplicity of navigation, no drop-down menus etc just simple clicks to get where you want to go.

However the banner at the top now has no real use other than to take up space. Previously there were links Home, TV, Radio, Talk, Where I Live, A-Z Index which made it easy to jump from one section to another. Now you have to go back to the home page to access other sections of the bbc.
Please could you add these links back.

I find the new site very straining on the eyes. The greys and blues are not as clear as the old black and white. White space has just been moved to the left of the screen. Can we not choose our own version?

I accept that web design evolves, and there's a constant call for design refresh - however that doesn't mean it's right. Newspapers have kept fundamentally the same look for 3 centuries, OK innovation was less fast tabloid and colour print being fundamental, but they do what they say on the tin.
So ....new design....OK...I liked the old one, presumably I'll get used to this one.......HOWEVER as with many other posts why the 1024 fixed width? - I have both a laptop 13 inch screen, and a 21 inch monitor - and gfr both of them I have my favourites explorer bar open, I now have to close that down, or scroll across. NOT HAPPY.
I can only assume that you want me to close my Favourites down, so as to linger longer on your site...well I'm sorry you used to be my home page...now you're not, shame really.

Sorry, I appreciate the effort, but you're just wasting screen space (some of us like to have other things like Skype open at the same time) and making me scroll more.

I hate scrolling! Sideways AND down!

It looks like there's less content on the redesigned site. Perhaps this is not the case, but I think you've gone too far the other way and left too much blank space on there.

Where's the news gone??? Until yesterday, I could see 30 headlines in one glance; now it's all empty space ... oh no, look: if I scroll down down down there are some vague shadows of text. :-(

Your double-banner takes up 30% of my (chosen) screen size at log-on; the menu/sidebar knocks another 10% off the left-hand side, then there's a big photo and lots of S P A C E ... buy hey! - you kept the "most e-mailed" box so I can see that someone somewhere is still sending 3-year-old news around cyberspace.

I presume the URL will be changed to read whitespace.bbc.co.uk as "news" is now secondary to style?

Characters are too large, too thin. Can't resize fonts properly. Layout is too wide (I like my browser to occupy 2 thirds of screen width (1280x800)). I really preferred the previous layout. My system: Firefox + Linux.
BBC did not test sufficiently before imposing upon readers.

I enjoy reading the blogs on the site (Robert Peston, Nick Robinson, Evan Davies etc.) and I was wondering is there a place which tells me on a single screen what the last post was for each blog the BBC does?

It does get annoying going to a blog and finding nothing new has been posted.

I accept that web design evolves, and there's a constant call for design refresh - however that doesn't mean it's right. Newspapers have kept fundamentally the same look for 3 centuries, OK innovation was less fast tabloid and colour print being fundamental, but they do what they say on the tin.
So ....new design....OK...I liked the old one, presumably I'll get used to this one.......HOWEVER as with many other posts why the 1024 fixed width? - I have both a laptop 13 inch screen, and a 21 inch monitor - and for both of them I have my Favourites explorer bar open, I now have to close that down, or scroll across. NOT HAPPY.
I can only assume that you want me to close my Favourites down, so as to linger longer on your site...well I'm sorry you used to be my home page...now you're not, shame really.

Characters are too large, too thin. Can't resize fonts properly. Layout is too wide (I like my browser to occupy 2 thirds of screen width (1280x800)). I really preferred the previous layout. My system: Firefox + Linux.
BBC did not test sufficiently before imposing upon readers.

Steve Hermann: The overall comments are quite negative. Please restore the previous design and put more thought into how you managed all this.

Odd, but it makes me think of the new Terminal at Heathrow.

A classic exampl;e of Hutber's Law in action. 'Better' means worse.

I will be deleting this web site from my bookmarks.

Is this an April fools joke one day early? The black banner at the top is ridiculous, taking up far too much space.
There is far too much empty space, please compact it. You will give all your users RSI from having to scroll up and down to find an item

I don't like the new design. This seems, like so many changes in newspaper and website design, to fall under the heading of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." And it wasn't broken. The new design occupies more screen real-estate and conveys less information.

Next thing up: newspapers with all the text in 50 point type! Announcers on the radio speak....ing....this...slow...ly...to...ma--ke....su--re....we...un...der....stand.

Other than that, it's great.

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE !!! - Change the text to a DARKER colour for more CONTRAST - it is very DIFFICULT to read and I have good average eyesight.

Characters are too large, too thin. Can't resize fonts properly. Fixed width design. Layout is too wide (I like my browser to occupy 2 thirds of screen width (1280x800)). I really preferred the previous layout. My system: Firefox + Linux.
BBC did not test sufficiently before imposing upon readers. Mr. Herrmann, this job was hurried and readers are not happy at all.

Why on earth have you lost the radio/TV/A-Z etc buttons that used to be at the top of the page? I have had News as my homepage for years, but then like to navigate from it to see eg what's on the radio, for background on TV programmes, to get details of what I'm listening to online on BBC Radio. Please reinstate the buttons in the dead area of speace at the top of the page.

How do you get to the radio pages - Radioplayer is there, sure, but what about the stations' web pages?

Change for change sake.

As you say research said most wanted left as it was, so you changed it any way. Why ask if you don't listen?

Great Success!
What a breath of freshness to content design in general! I hope this will become the benchmark for those awful american news sites, who just cram in every little bit of nonsense they can put their pixels on.

I've also fallen in love with the clock on the main BBC page. Couldn't that be introduced on the news page too (I beleive your page can recognise my time zone and therefor automatically show my time?)

Thank you designers for making BBC finally feel at home on my Mac.

Is this an April fools joke one day early? The black banner at the top is ridiculous.
There is far too much empty space, please compact it. You will give all your users RSI from having to scroll up and down to find an item

Love the new look BBC News pages. Can't wait until all the pages have changed over to the new style.

I can't see why people are complaining - it's much better. The old BBC News pages looked very 1990s. Finally, we have moved into the 21st century!

I guess some people just don't like change.

Will be nice to see some more Flash videos though - instead of having to use RealPlayer or Windows Media Player.

Overall I like it, looks more modernised. I did used to quite like being able to scan a lot of information in one go without scrolling but then again I didn't like all that extra space on the right side of the screen.

What I do miss is the links across the top of the page. I've only just figured out I can click on BBC to take me to the equivalent of the old "home" page.

Dreadful. The double banners at the top use up too much space. More and larger pictures use up even more space. In fact, there's hardly any space for the written news. Is this supposed to be a cartoon for those too lazy to read, or is it still supposed to be a news site ?

A great leap backwards designwise. Too much wasted space and type too big. You have to page down much more, which is silly because screens are getting bigger, not smaller. Also very 1980s and Look Around You. All it needs are newsreaders in beige tank-tops.

Well, the homepage looks ok at 1024 pixels wide. But all the story content is the same width it used to be with a huge right margin - pretty pointless if you ask me. Surely the point of making the page wider is to avoid having to scroll down so much?

Also, why are the dates at the bottom in Roman Numerals? Can we get rid of that outmoded concept please.

It looks fine for the most part, except for that big black bar up top which contrasts with the rest of the page.

Don't like the new spaced out layout - you term it 'wider'....whats that all about? It makes it difficult to read on a large screen - 1900x1200 upwards and makes one have to scroll to get the news items on bottom third of page.

Can you please make your 'wide' layout an option....please....

Overall I like it, looks more modernised. I did used to quite like being able to scan a lot of information in one go without scrolling but then again I didn't like all that extra space on the right side of the screen.

What I do miss is the links across the top of the page. I've only just figured out I can click on BBC to take me to the equivalent of the old "home" page.

Wow! Very pleasing on the eye I must say. Everything just seems so much clearer, although the odd story I click onto seems to go back to the 'old format' - snake vs croc being one example.

As so many others have said, this seems to be typical 'it's not broke, but let's have a go at fixing it anyway' that has caused all manner of problems, and no doubt consumed a huge amount of resources that could have been better employed improving content - you know, that thing we actually come to the BBC for.

The loss of the Weather link is clearly the most unpopular change - logically it should be with News, and in all honesty I'm not sure where else it would sit.

The overall design is poor with poor contrast between text and backround, a generally wishy-washy colour scheme and far too much white space. This isn't 'letting the content breathe' - it's wasting space and forcing users to spend more time scrolling (across as well as down, since not everyone has an all-singing, all-dancing LCD widescreen monitor of the type the Beeb, with their green agenda, should surely be opposed to!)

As someone else noted, it looks like a Blogger page, or more to the point a US news site. It's all very BBC Breakfast, magazine-y - I just hope the nature of the content doesn't begin to reflect the new aesthetic.

All in all, a miss for me. the old style was individual and had gravitas. This is anonymous, bland, boring and above all less user -friendly than what it replaced.

I quite like the clean new look, but the wide display makes the website very annoying to navigate on portable devices such as my phone and my internet tablet. With the increasing popularity of such devices going to a wider fixed width layout seems like a backward step. As suggested above, why not make the width flexible?

Looking at the source code I see that the tables are still being used for areas other than the site header & footer. I was rather hoping that with the new design this would stop happening as it is bad for accessibility, something which the new BBC website has been improving on. Hopefully this was get sorted in the near future.

Odd, but it makes me think of the new Terminal at Heathrow.

I really don't like the new design. There's too much white space and it takes up too much space on my browser. Also the font is too big and the black banner at the top is really ugly.

BBC News used to be my homepage and one of the great things about that is you could quickly update yourself with the news but now you can't instantly see whats going on and theres too much scrolling.

Can you not bring back the old design as an option?

Love the new look BBC News pages. Can't wait until all the pages have changed over to the new style.

I can't see why people are complaining - it's much better. The old BBC News pages looked very 1990s. Finally, we have moved into the 21st century!

I guess some people just don't like change.

Will be nice to see some more Flash videos though - instead of having to use RealPlayer or Windows Media Player.

The lighter shade of grey makes the text much harder to read. Especially for those who highlight areas of text with the mouse cursor so as to be able to read white on black - are now faced with grey on black with is even worse than grey on white.

"Is it possible to get back to the old version please ...
The new version is hard on the eyes, and uses more space to show less."

Seconded!

I use 1280 x 1024 and find that having to scroll vertically to read stuff that used to be just sitting at the bottom of the page is a real pain. Bring back the density!

What about providing your users with a choice of layouts (old/new)? The website MUST be written in such a manner to be able to deliver the content to different devices (e.g. PCs, PDAs, etc), so what about giving us a choice?

A big step backwards.
Way too much whitespace - you now have to scroll to see UK and World headlines and "Most Popular".
Headlines are too big, pictures are too big.
Even the font looks a bit Fisher-Price.
It worked very well the way it was before, why change it to this?

There's no longer a link to the "Talk" page at the top of the page.
The only way I could navigate to it was by going through random pages until I found an old-style one with the link on it.

A big step backwards.
Way too much whitespace - you now have to scroll to see UK and World headlines and "Most Popular".
Headlines are too big, pictures are too big.
Even the font looks a bit Fisher-Price.
It worked very well the way it was before, why change it to this?

I quite like the clean new look, but the wide display makes the website very annoying to navigate on portable devices such as my phone and my internet tablet. With the increasing popularity of such devices going to a wider fixed width layout seems like a backward step. As suggested above, why not make the width flexible?

Hmmm... While some of the new design looks cleaner, the wider minimum width is a pain. It means that I often end up having to scroll left and right, and that makes a site much less readable.

Note that, just because my screen is wider than X, it doesn't mean I will always have my browser windows set to use all that width. A good design would allow the extra width to be used if the reader made it available, but would not insist on having that extra width. In this, the new design fails.

(...and this add-a-comment system has failed to accept this comment at least four times so far, too...)

The lighter shade of grey makes the text much harder to read. Especially for those who highlight areas of text with the mouse cursor so as to be able to read white on black - are now faced with grey on black with is even worse than grey on white.

I absolutely love the new design, you can see alot of time and effort has been put into this, and it really has paid off.

Reverse! Reverse! It was fine like it was, usable, concise, rich in content, easily digestible. This is change for change sake. I hope you didn't spend too much of our money on it, because you should put it back the way it was.

This is not an improvement as many of other comments tell you also.

The 'wider' layout does not aid fluent reading and looks odd & slightly 'stupid'....

Can you atleast make the old or new look an option for selection...please

I love the new look - Really nice, and fits well with the overall look of the new BBC Home Page. I'd like to be able to customise it in the same way that I can with the Home Page - Is that going to be an option soon?

Nice work guys.

Great Success!
What a breath of freshness to content design in general! I hope this will become the benchmark for those awful american news sites, who just cram in every little bit of nonsense they can put their pixels on.

I've also fallen in love with the clock on the main BBC page. Couldn't that be introduced on the news page too (I beleive your page can recognise my time zone and therefor automatically show my time?)

Thank you designers for making BBC finally feel at home on my Mac.

Dreadful. Ok, I'm using 1024x768 and sometimes higher resolution still, but I DON'T want to have to have my browser filling up my entire desktop in order to read the site "at a glance".

This is a very fundamental design mistake in the CSS.

The grey text makes for difficult reading.

Especially for those who highlight areas of text with the cursor so as to be able to read white on black - now get grey on black which is even worse than grey on white.

I think the changes are well thought through, and easier on the eye.

However, I would like to see the BBC look at alternative audio/video options. In particular, I'd like to see a move away from using RealPlayer if at all possible. There are better alternatives.

The new look was a delightful surprise when I logged on this morning, particularly the centred layout and a bit more white space on the pages. The only problem is that your blog is ranged to the left Mr. Herrmann which is a shame but maybe this will follow - otherwise great!

I like it - much more open, fresh and definitely more modern.

Bit odd though when pages in the old style load, although it is an excellent way to compare old and new (and I prefer new, thanks).

I fall into the "too much white space" camp. Yes, the old design was a bit cramped, but the new one has so much space that you have to either make the page much longer (the home page is now 2 pages on my 1280 x 1024 screen) or lose hyperlinks or information. Somewhere inbetween please.

What a nightmare! The new double height banner is a waste of space, I now have to scroll down further to eliminate it, you still haven't fixed the annoying headline scroller which makes me wait for a story link to reappear if I take more than a couple of milliseconds to read and click on it, and by far the worst thing is, the fixed size(!!!) layout.

If there was one thing you needed to fix more than anything else, it was to make the pages take advantage of the capability of web browsers to adjust the contents to fit the window While Previously, at least the pages were relatively thin, and it was not necessary to scale the window to the full width to view the page.

This bit is important, so please read it twice: Requiring my web browser to be 3/4ers of the width of my particular screen in order to read your site is HIGHLY INTRUSIVE and as such is very inconsiderate of you! Please fix this urgently, and let me decide how big I want windows to be.

(I assume my comment was modded into oblivion before due to the HTML - which the text to the left says is allowed - but here goes again)

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE !!! - Change the text to a DARKER colour for more CONTRAST - it is very DIFFICULT to read and I have good average eyesight.

Designers, I know, like to be bold with white space - which is fine if you can see the whole page in one go, but here the effect of the extra white space is to increase the amount of scrolling you need to do to get to the content at the bottom. This is annoying.

The short headlines in the "Around the World Now" section look particularly lost in their new sea of triplespaced whiteness.

Sorry, it's not as good as the old design. Too much sideways scrolling needed. Why doesn't the site just expand to the width of the browser.

Another problem with the fixed width idea is that it only works if you use browser full screen. If you are in the habit of having your Favourites on the left of your browser you have to scroll to see left of page. Very poor design. The page either need to be made to fill only available width (preferred) or the set width needs to be smaller.

Generally, OK, however the excessive leading between lines of text does create a *lot* of vertical scrolling. It's much more difficult to get a feel of news at a glance. Tighten the vertical spacing.

Love the new design!

More white space works really well, what a refreshing change from other cramped websites....

Reverse! Reverse! It was fine like it was, usable, concise, rich in content, easily digestible. This is change for change sake. I hope you didn't spend too much of our money on it, because you should put it back the way it was.

Sorry to be a Nay-Sayer but I don't like the new design. Change for changes sake if you ask me.

Spacing news items further apart just makes it harder to take in. The old site was perfect in that you could see all the headlines in one quick glance, rather than having to 'read' the whole page. I only check in to the news page to get a quick update and if required delve further into the story by clicking on it, with the new site this isn't so easily done. Sorry.

Don't like it. I preferred the narrow version, because I work with more than one window open, and now your wider version crowds my other windows.

Also, your new version, with all the extra white space, has a childish feel.

Hate the light type, can't read it easily also the spacing is wrong between lines - very difficult to read now - please return to old style.

Increased screen size isn't an excuse to bloat your web page. People get larger screens to fit more onto them, not to bloat out what they already have. The new page is much more difficult to read. I prefer things more compact.
As disk space and memory increase, Microsoft software bloats out to fill it. Are you taking a leaf out of their book with screen space?

A great leap backwards designwise. Too much wasted space and type too big. You have to page down much more, which is silly because screens are getting bigger, not smaller. Also very 1980s and Look Around You. All it needs are newsreaders in beige tank-tops.

A great leap backwards designwise. Too much wasted space and type too big. You have to page down much more, which is silly because screens are getting bigger, not smaller. Also very 1980s and Look Around You. All it needs are newsreaders in beige tank-tops.

I quite look the new look, but the width makes it much harder to navigate on my phone and 7" laptop. With the increasing number of portable web devices this seems like a step backwards. Why not have a variable width design?

Dear Sir,
I think the new design is horrendous. I am viewing the site on a screen greater than 1024 pixels wide, though even people with 1024 pixel wide screens will see these problems as the site is 994 pixels wide, even accounting for the width of the border of a browser, this is not 1024px. The new background for the rest of the screen is grey, conflicting with the colour of the left menu bar, the text of the articles, which is no longer black, and especially the quotes that are pulled out of the article, which may even be a lighter shade of grey. The banner at the top of the pages is now of variable size: The left hand column seems to be on top, giving a 6px difference. The right column is now much bigger compared to the article itself and the left hand column, giving the impression, now that the site is centred within the browser, that the article itself seem weirdly positioned to the left of centre, making the page look unbalanced.
Could the rss feeds contain the content of stories as opposed to just the titles and one descriptive line?

I'm an international user and read the BBC news daily, instead of the American news sites. What a disappointment when I opened the site this morning. The wide page means it no longer fits my small laptop screen without a scroll bar at the bottom. The font needs to be darker, and there is too much white space. On the plus side - the images are better. I was happy to see that many of the other pages on the site still retain the old look. Please don't change them all.

Where did you get the figure '95%' of people using (widescreen) format? This display has now compromised the 3x4 format with incessant scrolling to read the screen. The change was far too soon fo most users surely.

Regarding the new BBC news page layout. Where has the equivalent of the grey bar with links to radio and tv etc. gone? These were really useful.

Hate the light type, can't read it easily also the spacing is wrong between lines - very difficult to read now - please return to old style.

Change is a good thing but this is a case of one step forwards and five steps backwards.

Using more width is understandable, but you seem to have achieved this by keeping the layout the same and making everything bigger! Not good at all. The jumbo text makes my eyes hurt and I actually get to see less information despite the page hogging a bigger chunk of my screen.

The only positive from my point of view is the new embedded content - much more friendly than using external media players.

Please post more than one headline in the "Around the World" section of the front page.

Comprehensive world news is why I log onto the BBC. Only listing the one "top" headline from each region seriously handicaps that and it's too time consuming to load the page for each region separately.

I think you should carry out a poll. You've removed the top horizontal tabs, so now the user has to scroll down to get to the sport pages! Not sure that was such a good idea ... I like the old website better.

Designers, I know, like to be bold with white space - which is fine if you can see the whole page in one go, but here the effect of the extra white space is to increase the amount of scrolling you need to do to get to the content at the bottom. This is annoying.

The short headlines in the "Around the World Now" section look particularly lost in their new sea of triplespaced whiteness.

The serif font which I (Linux/Firefox) see, presumably as a fallback, is a bad idea: serif is great for paper, but bad for the screen. It's much too hard to read: please change the fallback to sans-serif for those of us without Verdana installed. (I agree with Sam Hare; comment 239.) Or is this going to be another iPlayer where only Windows users count, as the rest of us are an insignificant minority?

The only real problem is, as others have said, the too-wide black bar. What's the point, other than showing how cool your designers are? Useability should always trump style on a news site, and it doesn't seem to have done so here. I have to scroll down slightly to see the bottom half of the "Video and Audio News" and sport headlines; without the rather useless black bar I wouldn't have to.

Those two major quibbles apart, I think I could quite easily get used to the new design. I do prefer the old one, and by some distance, but the new one will probably grow on me once it shows a font I can actually read from any distance!

The new clean design is nice - but the extra simplicity is ruined by adding the fairly useless huge black masthead!

The tab-like links to the Weather/Radio etc were a much better use of that space. And with IE copying the Firefox tabbed browsing approach it's almost as though your previously excellent page design is going backwards.

And why has the text been made bigger and greyer? Is it just to make us have to scroll more? Or is there some other clever reason that so far escapes me? Perhaps you've made it bigger to help us read the grey!

I absolutely love the new design, you can see alot of time and effort has been put into this, and it really has paid off. I have got a 22" Widescreen monitor, and making the page centre screen has really helped alot!.

Useless...

Doesn't size properly in browser window.

Where are the useful links.. Radio...Weather etc.

Change for changes sake with no apparent benefit, only a removal of features.

Try shooting the other foot off now...

I am pleased with the increase in width but not with the vertical spacing. The banner at the top seems deeper than necessary. I used to set the position on the screen so that the Ticker was at the top and the local news and popular items just appeared at the bottom. This enabled an overall view of everything important. Now you have to scroll a few inches up to see the same. In anycase the bottom area is far too open spaced.

So it's no longer BBC NEWS, it's now BBC BBC NEWS? Why not add another BBC logo up there just for the hell of it - it could be BBC BBC BBC NEWS!
The design overall is an improvement, and I especially like the sneak preview of the new look for the News on the strap at the top, but the top left hand side looks a MESS. The big BBC logo is fine - it matches the new look across the BBC, but why then place the BBC NEWS logo right under it? It would look better if the horizontal BBC NEWS logo had been used (seeing as this is the logo used everywhere else), and put on the right or in the middle, with the image on the left, so that the two BBC logos don't clash as they do now. Please sort this out - it really lets down the page and just looks daft. If you don't know what I mean, take a look at how an amateur has made the strap at the top look ten times better with a subtle tweak (about half way down): http://www.tvforum.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?t=27126&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=996

Literally a waste of space!
Increased screen size isn't an excuse to bloat your web page. People get larger screens to fit more onto them, not to bloat out what they already have. The new page is much more difficult to read. I prefer things more compact.
As disk space and memory increase, Microsoft software bloats out to fill it. Are you taking a leaf out of their book, only with screen space.

Well it seems that the BBC have decided to fix something that never needed fixing in the first place.

The site now looks like it was designed by a chid, for some reason the BBC decided that we al need reading glasses and everything should be larger than before. I could also drive a battleship between the stories,w hich makes everything on the page melt into the background.

Why does te site now centre itseff in my browser? This looks particularly stupid on a widescreen monitor where the eyes are automatically drawn to the left for reading.

"Many of those we asked said leave it alone" wel it seems that perhas you shoud have listened, or was it a case that the designers had to be seen to be doing something or face losing their jobs?

The BBC is a respected organisation, do not turn it into a childish remnant of itself.

Flash fails on Firefox + Linux i386, even though I have the latest versions installed. However, being standards compliant too: 242 errors on the validator.w3.org site for URL:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7322134.stm

Must try harder.
Alex.

Regardless of the line of business getting to the top is hard work, remaining there is even harder. Consequently there is the constant search for improvement. This search often results if change simply for the same of change, some of them very bad indeed. The new BBC website is a perfect example of a bad change. I find it less clear and more difficult to navigate. You could put this down to an issue of personal preference and you may be right to do so. The problem is everyone I have spoken to about the new BBC site shares my opinion. There are times when the old saying "if it aint broke don't fix it" should be given serious consideration.

I am pleased with the increase in width but not with the vertical spacing. The banner at the top seems deeper than necessary. I used to set the position on the screen so that the Ticker was at the top and the local news and popular items just appeared at the bottom. This enabled an overall view of everything important. Now you have to scroll a few inches up to see the same. In anycase the bottom area is far too open spaced.
There must be a better way to post these comments umteen tries later!!!!!!!!!!

Well done BBC. Had a sneaky suspicion change was on the way due to the blue links for audio/video that crept in a few days ago and the new BBC homepage. People don't like change but will get used to it.

Now, only if you could sort out the iPlayer....

It seems to me that requests for going back to the previous layout outnumber support for a revamp. I would suggest a reader's poll to decide the issue.

It does seem that we should be careful what we wish for. We asked for more width and we got it, although not exactly in the way most people were expecting.

The white space at the left has been filled by making everything else bigger.

I have looked at an archived version of the old page, and it would appear from a fairly unscientific sample (copy and paste a line each from old and new into notepad) that although there is now about 1cm more width for news text on the page, the larger font means there is no more news per line, which does somewhat defeat the point of making the page 25% wider.

The BBC News website is the main "newspaper" that I read, so it is important for me. I really like the new design. It is cleaner and easier to read due to the extra space you have provided.

The serif font which I (Linux/Firefox) see, presumably as a fallback, is a bad idea: serif is great for paper, but bad for the screen. It's much too hard to read: please change the fallback to sans-serif for those of us without Verdana installed. (I agree with Sam Hare; comment 239.) Or is this going to be another iPlayer where only Windows users count, as the rest of us are an insignificant minority?

The only real problem is, as others have said, the too-wide black bar. What's the point, other than showing how cool your designers are? Useability should always trump style on a news site, and it doesn't seem to have done so here. I have to scroll down slightly to see the bottom half of the "Video and Audio News" and sport headlines; without the rather useless black bar I wouldn't have to.

Those two major quibbles apart, I think I could quite easily get used to the new design. I do prefer the old one, and by some distance, but the new one will probably grow on me once it shows a font I can actually read from any distance!

I'm not a fan of the new look. As other contributors have said the masthead takes up too much room and the black band looks like you are in mourning. I also have several windows open and would prefer a narrower version so I don't need to take up the whole screen. There is too much white space for my liking. It looks much better if I reduce the page to 75% but then the text is too small to read. Bring back the more easily readable black text too.

Not good. Too much space.

Looks like a throw back to the 1970s with the 9 O'Clock news clock and roman numerals.

And why do I have adverts!!!!

If it ain't broke don't fix it.

Congratulations on finally updating the site - what you have now is a nice start.
I have three suggestions:
1. Return the link to listen to the BBC World Service online to the top of the page - perhaps a larger, nicer graphic such as the BBC World Service logo would look visually appealing, and help carry the theme of the site's intergration into the network of BBC sites.
2. For the video stories which appear on the home page, include an icon which the user can click to read a text version of the story as it is difficult to find the text of the video stories.
3. Allow users to click on photos in stories to see larger versions of the photo, and a slide show of other large pictures related to the story.
Thanks for listening, and keep up the good work!

I check BBC News and Sport pages every couple of hours seven days a week. It wasn't cramped, it was comprehensive. I digested a lot more in the old layout and felt like I was able to pick out a lot more news with a single visit.

By comparison the new view is now a lot more clumsy and you have to do a lot more (i.e. scroll, stare) to even hope to digest as much information or spot news that is of interest. That can't be progress. As someone else said, this is change for the sake of change.

One specific remark - the idea that such a large percentage have 1024px width views is deeply deeply flawed in a year when the iPhone, the EEE PC and other truly mobile browsers are must-have gadgets and many peoples new web access method of choice. Did your staff not bother with any trend forecasting when they cherry-picked the site feedback to suit the pithy remarks about 'room to breathe'?

The text seems too faint and not as sharp on my computer. There is too much white space, and I found it more difficult and tiring to read. The old display was superior and for visually impaired people I don't think this is an improvement. Please let's have an option to retain the old display.

I hate the new look.
It's difficult to read and you have to scroll for miles. The font size looks wrong and it seems to have double line spacing.

The old look was far superior, I loved the way it was compact, easy to read and quick to locate what you wanted. Now you have to search around scrolling to find what you want.
Bring back the old look!!

I am very disappointed with the new look and feel. This is supposed to be a news website and it appears that you are sacrificing the volume of news for the look of the site. I am particularly disappointed with the reduction of stories in the regional section at the bottom. Instead of two, you now have one. A good web desginer knows that you should never sacrifice the content for the look. Additionally, the slightly larger font and spead out sections remind me of a book for children. Please don't dumb us down like the American news sites. You should have increased the number of stories in these sections, not decreased them. This has been my favorite news site for the last 5 years. However, if this is a harbinger of things to come, then I might have to start looking elsewhere.

There seems to be an urge in IT departments to improve things that already work fine.

The old style page had a pleasing and familiar look, I knew where to go to find things without having to read the whole page first.

I doubt that you were inundated with requests from users to update the existing news page to include less information, so why do it?

The serif font which I (Linux/Firefox) see, presumably as a fallback, is a bad idea: serif is great for paper, but bad for the screen. It's much too hard to read: please change the fallback to sans-serif for those of us without Verdana installed. (I agree with Sam Hare; comment 239.) Or is this going to be another iPlayer where only Windows users count, as the rest of us are an insignificant minority?

The only real problem is, as others have said, the too-wide black bar. What's the point, other than showing how cool your designers are? Useability should always trump style on a news site, and it doesn't seem to have done so here. I have to scroll down slightly to see the bottom half of the "Video and Audio News" and sport headlines; without the rather useless black bar I wouldn't have to.

Those two major quibbles apart, I think I could quite easily get used to the new design. I do prefer the old one, and by some distance, but the new one will probably grow on me once it shows a font I can actually read from any distance!

Yes, yes, very pretty, but does it really matter what it looks like? Surely it's the content that should be the priority.

And if you must tinker with the website, then I would have thought it would be much more useful to fix the technical glitches that mean that 9 times out of 10 when I try to post a comment to a blog such as this one, I just get a "page not found" error. Let's see if this one makes it through...

I generally like the new design - but I think there is too much white space now. I hate the fact I have to scroll down to see the "most emailed" stories. Maybe reduce that a little. There was something amazing about having all the news you needed to know without having to scroll past ads etc. on the old site.

The new design is awful - the extra white space makes it impossible to quickly digest the information and get to the stories that you wish to view. It takes up far too much of the screen estate and even then much more scrolling is required than previously. A disaster.

In my opinion, all you will do is disenfranchise previous regular visitors and lose market share.

Sorry BBC but I'm not impressed :-( It seems to be more change for change's sake and is not an overall improvement to a respected site that a) worked well and b) I really quite liked. Now the screen looks very spartan and altogether 'thin', with an unappealing primary school approach to presenting material. I don't believe for one minute that you will change it back again but from what I've read on other postings, I know that I'm not alone in being disappointed regarding how you've spent my licence-fee.

Awful. Just like the new homepage design and the news. Do you realise that to move between news and sport you have to scroll all the way down to the bottom of the screen (as opposed to the old version where it was at the top)? How ridiculous is that! Please - change it back. (btw you said yourself that many people that you asked liked it...so honestly, why did you decide to waste our money on this?)

Looks good. Glad it's centralised. There's a bit less text under each of the geogrpahic areas - only one news topic each - can this be returned to the 3/4 topics we had before.

I use news.bbc.co.uk for the text and images - for video I would use the telly. (Many of us use the site in the workplace).

After seeing the recent changes to the home page I was quite excited to see what would happen with the rest of the site.

The design itself seems to be going in the right direction (but may need some thought about spacing). But over all I'm disappointed in the lack of care in ensuring accessibility and usability are met.

The use of tables for layout well out of date and its clear from some of the comments above that proper cross browser testing wasn't completed. Also the amount of WC3 errors was very disheartening. I expected more from the BBC.

You decided to go for a bigger screen size because 95% of people have big enough screens? What about the other 5% - surely in such a popular website thats quite a lot of people?

Maybe a beta version may have been a good idea to iron out issues?

Congratulations for undertaking this refreshing!

As anything in progress, you make it better bit by bit. Personally, I am thrilled with the new width and the bigger photos because I have the right kind of screen. However, I fully agree with the CSS that other readers recommend.

Regarding the banners, they could be fused together or placed on one 'line'. The accessibility options, one-minute news, search and news feeds are indeed what should go on top, but do you really your 2 banners one below the other? This would reduce down scrolling.

Keep up the good work. As designers or artists know, we only recognize what we already know, so it takes a while for the eye to adjust. Or for innovation to become main stream.

I accept that web design evolves, and there's a constant call for design refresh - however that doesn't mean it's right. Newspapers have kept fundamentally the same look for 3 centuries, OK innovation was less fast tabloid and colour print being fundamental, but they do what they say on the tin.
So ....new design....OK...I liked the old one, presumably I'll get used to this one.......HOWEVER as with many other posts why the 1024 fixed width? - I have both a laptop 13 inch screen, and a 21 inch monitor - and for both of them I have my Favourites explorer bar open, I now have to close that down, or scroll across. NOT HAPPY.
I can only assume that you want me to close my Favourites down, so as to linger longer on your site...well I'm sorry you used to be my home page...now you're not, shame really.

Agreeing with many of the points already posted with regards to the vertical space.

I prefer the old design where all the info was on the page.

Now you have to scroll down to read many of the stories which is a nuisance and will probably result in missing some stories.

Also I find the text harder to read because of the lighter font.

The site does look more professional but its less practical.

I like it. It's a clean, modern look free from the clutter I get on a site like cnn.com. The embedded video works well too.

Definitely change for the better.

It looks ok... but what's with the table based layout? I assume this is a transitionary design and that a CSS (semantically correct) layout is in the pipeline?

I loved the tight format you had before, it allowed the eyes to quickly progress to the content of choice, now everything is so spaced out it almost hurts my eyes trying to look for something of interest.

Additionally the colour of the links is too light, as is the font weight. The overall effect making it seem messy.

Is their a way we can see the old site, as an option.

Nasty shock together with nasty new look. I very much doubt that you were inundated with users asking you to change the format and suspect it was more a case of finding something for your web designers to do. Not so much a "site refresh" as a "site for sore eyes"!

old-fashioned, empty, boring - sorry, I much preferred the old compact version, and its too big for my XP IE& screen.

Please post more than one headline from each region in the "Around the World Now" section on the "News Front Page".

Comprehensive world news is why I log onto the BBC news website. Only listing one headline from each region seriously handicapps that. It is too time consuming to load the page for each region separately.

Having three to five headlines from each region would suffice.

Agreeing with many of the points already posted with regards to the vertical space.

I prefer the old design where all the info was on the page.

Now you have to scroll down to read many of the stories which is a nuisance and will probably result in missing some stories.

Also I find the text harder to read because of the lighter font.

The site does look more professional but its less practical.

Why do you need TWO huge stupid virtually functionless banners at the top? Can't you make it at least ONE huge stupid functionless banner? Or two SMALL ones?

The customised local news/weather/sport of interest has vanished - why?

Sport/Weather need to be better integrated. Why bury them?

It's much harder to scan through with everything all spread out and more scrolling required.

Graphically it's pretty. But so what if you can't find what you want, or if what you can see (e.g. those pointless banners) is a waste of space?

Some people are calling this "Very Web 2.0" - how can that be true if even the basic personalisation options have vanished?

Absolutely awful. Exactly the same as the old style, just new graphics (with the top BBC bar being completely useless and taking up a stupid amount of vertical space) and forced larger fonts.

The amount of white space is just ridiculous. It may "look modern", but it completely ruins the usability of the site.

The site is now completely unusable on small devices such as the Asus EEE (800px wide screen) without side scrolling. I imagine the situation is similar for any mobile devices. Only the BBC could make their site less usable on mobile platforms at a time when they are really starting to take off.

Even in this post you admit that only 95% of users are browsing with large resolutions - you've just made the site harder to use for 5% of your visitors, with minimal usability improvements for anyone else.

Where is the link to tonight's TV?

Please bring back the three headlines under each world area in the 'Around the World Now' section: one headline only unfairly prioritizes that single article, and seems likely to restrict the reading in international news to the one item BBC has chosen, instead of leaving the choice with the reader who is quickly browsing the front page (and not each world area page individually).

I agree with others' suggestions: provide a choice of layouts, old/new!!!!

Sorry BBC but I'm not impressed :-( It seems to be more change for change's sake and is not an overall improvement to a respected site that a) worked well and b) I really quite liked. Now the screen looks very spartan and altogether 'thin', with an unappealing primary school approach to presenting material. I don't believe for one minute that you will change it back again but from what I've read on other postings, I know that I'm not alone in being disappointed regarding how you've spent my licence-fee.

Hey! I use the Mosaic browser on my trusty old Windows 95 box, and I don't like this new design at all. Change it back plz :)

The new clean design is nice - but the extra simplicity is ruined by adding the fairly useless huge black masthead!

The tab-like links to the Weather/Radio etc were a much better use of that space. And with IE copying the Firefox tabbed browsing approach it's almost as though your previously excellent page design is going backwards.

And why has the text been made bigger and greyer? Is it just to make us have to scroll more? Or is there some other clever reason that so far escapes me? Perhaps you've made it bigger to help us read the grey!

I would have kept it the same, I liked being able to see everything rather than having to scroll down like I have to do now. I would bold the headlines on the sides like before so it's easier to find articles of interest. Also the "Americans" page needs some work.

I see a number of people have been complaining about fonts. As Ian (a different Ian) says in #84, the font size cannot be changed by the user (when using browsers such as Firefox). This is contrary to your own accessibility standards and guidelines which state "13.1. Page layout MUST accommodate the enlarging of text."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/guidelines/newmedia/accessibility/

I've also never liked pages that assume a specific browser window width. I vary mine from wide to narrow. When I make the browser window narrow, I end up having to scroll horizontally which is a huge usability issue. I'd rather have a narrow page than a wide one for that very reason.

Let the content fill the available space - but don't fill more than the available space. Let the web browser do it's job intead of taking over for it.

I don't like it - it makes me feel like a child with all the big spaces. It looks less credible, as if everything is made 'easier' to digest. Why not let us choose?

Really nice, works fine in Firefox 3 so I don't understand some of the complaints about that?

Maybe just trim off some of the vertical spacing so you can see more of the page at once.
And offer an 800 x 600 version for people stuck in the stone age.

It looks awful. It looks like you've used the white space to increase the space between lines and paragraphs etc, with the same amount of white space between sections. As a result the refresh (especially the front page) looks too cluttered. Why aren't you using the white space intelligently? And as for the banner...

Awful - too much white space..creates eye strain for me..text is less visible and doesnt stand out so much

It just reminds me of American websites or of updates yahoo mail and the like, it just seems like a clone website.

Put it back to how it was - it is now not very readable.

The black banner at the top of the news page is superfluous. Surely the letters BBC are enough branding alone. Move the search feature on the black banner to the right hand side of the banner below and make the BBC letters on that banner live-link to the homepage. Or just use the previous slim grey one.

The new CSS seems to either be broken or a number of your authors are using it incorrectly - just look for the text, "At any moment Mr Cameron might have stood on the pedals, calves globular, and streaked out of sight like a sprinter in the last hundred metres of the Tour de France." In the most recent "A point of view" to see what I mean (you may need to use Firefox 2.0.0.13 to see this). Or is that text meant to be microscopically small?

It also seems to be impossible to use Firefox to post comments and a quick look at the page source shows that while P tags are opened many, many times, they are not closed again.

I am looking at the site from abroad and the adverts actually BLOCK out some of the information on the far right hand side. They need to be moved even further over to the right!

What a drag! Like many other of the respondees on this trail, I always have other material on the screen (such as favourites) and I find the constant need to scroll a real pain. Why not give us a "classic layout" option similar to the "Text friendly" option?

Dreadful. The double banners at the top use up too much space. More and larger pictures use up even more space. In fact, there's hardly any space for the written news. Is this supposed to be a cartoon for those too lazy to read, or is it still supposed to be a news site ?

The new wider more open layout does NOT let me display the favourites column (I have many favourites) at the left without losing a sizable part of the News page display, so the new layout gets a NO VOTE from me.

Well!! Another triumph of style over substance. The screen may have "room to breathe" and have a more overall pleasing look, but it is NOT supposed to be a work of art, it is to be READ. It is horrible to read and is washed out and spread out far to much for the eye.
I can just imagine the rubbish being spoken in the BBC "development" meetings. The Emperors new clothes springs to mind.

A refresh from time to time is always beneficial - it forces everyone to look again at something which can otherwise become taken for granted.

As this is a work in progress, I'm happy to watch progress with interest. My only adverse comment is a personal dislike of the wider line-spacing on the text which I find unhelpful when reading, and means more scrolling around. The increased use of white space is appreciated, but it gets diluted when there's more white space within, rather that around, the text. The blogs are a particular culprit!

Apart from that, well done for takng the brave step outside the comfortably familiar, and enjoy the journey.

I like it but you've removed the bar from the very front page that allows you to click on 'radio, tv' etc. I have bbc.co.uk as a favourites page and check the headlines before linking to the radio. It's at the top of your blog but not the front page. Any chance of changing it?

I do not like the breathing room-- I have to scroll too much and you seem to have sacrificed news in order to give me space. Why aren't there two stories for each subheading at the bottom? I'm pretty sure more than one big event happens in each region every day, and I don't have time to check the site constantly to find stories while they're still up top. At the very least, go back to 2 stories per subheading!

It's good but I think you should change the bars across the top -- either remove the black one, or remove the BBC logo from the 'news' bar so they don't clash.

The new wider more open layout does NOT let me display the favourites column (I have many favourites) at the left without losing a sizable part of the News page display, so the new layout gets a NO VOTE from me.

Horrible, horrible, bad design.

Most of the white space is wasted space.

Get rid of the huge chunk of wasted vertical space taken up by the banners at the top.

The only good thing about the new layout is that the new font is marginally more readable. But then it has been made grey, not black so that degrades readability again!

The fixed-width layout is atrocious. Do you think we all use the same browser at the same window size on the same screen at the same resolution?

For now I'm using the "low graphics" version. At least I can read that comfortably.

Oh and naturally the audio and video still don't work properly. When will you stop using proprietary formats?

Sorry - I hate it. It looks "clunky".

In this day and age you would at least expect a modern website to dynamically adjust to fit the given browser window - that your site no longer does this is a major disappointment.

Absolutely awful. Exactly the same as the old style, just new graphics (with the top BBC bar being completely useless and taking up a stupid amount of vertical space) and forced larger fonts.

The amount of white space is just ridiculous. It may "look modern", but it completely ruins the usability of the site.

The site is now completely unusable on small devices such as the Asus EEE (800px wide screen) without side scrolling. I imagine the situation is similar for any mobile devices. Only the BBC could make their site less usable on mobile platforms at a time when they are really starting to take off.

Even in this post you admit that only 95% of users are browsing with large resolutions - you've just made the site harder to use for 5% of your visitors, with minimal usability improvements for anyone else.

It looks cartoonish and where's the sport/weather/etc. tabs? Also text is randomly smaller or larger in places... not a fan I'm afraid - and the constant switching between the old version and the new one is annoying. Bring back the old version!

I don't think there's a single thing I prefer in the new layout, except possibly the left-hand justified menu bar. Although my screen is set to display 1024 pixels I never run anything at full screen as I like to be able to move easily to other open windows and see what's going on there. A little wider would have been fine but why the whole screen?

And why is the font size so huge? It looks like an easy reader for backward six year olds! Together with the pointlessly large banners it means that only the top story is visible on the front page. Even with the larger pictures (which might sometimes be worthwhile, but not Di PoW!) there is wasted space underneath, unbalancing the look, because the text is much longer than the height of the picture. In Firefox you can set a minimum font size - now we need a maximum font size.

Isn't there research showing how quickly people decide whether or not to read further? How much will be missed because people don't want to scroll down or across?