OJ Review: The BBC

For this week's blog entry I am reviewing the online content of an international news organization, the BBC.

The BBC home page is an attractive, link-heavy page that is offers a lot of customization to users. It is a "home base" of sorts for online news readers, where they can access news or set their local region or language preferences.

The BBC page uses a lot of links to access a lot of content. The page is packed with news from all over the world, and it's evident there's more here to choose from than your standard newspaper. Without space constraints, the BBC is able to put much more news on the web than they would be able to on paper.

The site has a good news mix and appears to cater to a wide range of viewers. Apart from traditional news stories, the BBC site has videos, images, discussion boards and RSS feed options to cater to its tech-savvy users. A consumer on the BBC Web site can view a wide variety of news on countless types of media.

As for the stories themselves, I give them mixed reviews. Namely, the story page layout is far less clean and attractive than the homepage. The story page template is much different than the home page, which felt inconsistent. The content also seems cramped, trapped on the leftmost 1/3 or so of the page. The story page also didn't make very good use of F-shaped design, and seems to make the user work hard while reading the news.

The actual writing of the story, on the other hand, was well-done. The writing itself differed from that of print journalism to appeal to the online audience. Namely, the story was shorter, and used block quotes and links throughout. The lead was also bolded to catch the user's attention.

Perhaps the most admirable aspect of the BBC's story page was the sidebar with dozens of related links that users can navigate to if they so desire. This function more than makes up for the subpar layout on the story page because it gives so much control to the user in the online environment.

Despite a few drawbacks in layout and presentation, it seems the BBC site is one of the most complete and well-linked news sites operating today.