The BBC today unveils a new homepage, as one of the UK’s most popular websites begins a ground-up redesign.
With its touchscreen-friendly “carousel” interface, the BBC plans to introduce a more consistent design for all its sites and across PC, mobile, tablet and internet-TV devices. The idea is that users feel like they are flicking through a magazine, making the site less “task oriented” and showcasing a wider range of BBC content.
But the reboot isn’t merely superficial. The BBC faces a similar problem to MSN, Yahoo and AOL: retaining traffic, as search and social links deliver more and more of its visitors.
“Homepages have plateaued at best,” says Ian Hunter, managing editor of BBC Online. “While we have held up, we have not particularly improved.”
Nielsen ranks the BBC overall as the UK’s fourth most popular family of sites, after Google, Microsoft and Facebook. The BBC homepage remains the broadcaster’s third most popular “product” after its News and Sport sites, with 9m unique visitors a week across all devices.
“It’s still quite a heavy hitter in terms of our presence online and very important in terms of our brand,” says Mr Hunter. “It’s a statement of what the BBC thinks is important at any moment in time for its online audience.”
Today, it sends the vast majority of its traffic on to News, Sport and Weather. The BBC hopes that by promoting its iPlayer catch-up site, children’s services such as Cbeebies and other internal sites in the carousel and a “most popular” column, it can make better use of those 9m users and give them more of a reason to return.
Mr Hunter says it will be “quite a tall ambition” to increase traffic, but a “fundamental indicator of success” is to share it more widely.
Over time, the BBC may also start to add links to external sites to its homepage too, as part of its public-service commitment to double referrals to its commercial rivals. The iPlayer has already added links to shows on ITVPlayer and 4oD.
One thing the BBC is not doing with this refresh is integrating Facebook, Twitter or other social networks, and it’s actually dialled back the amount of personalisation available.
Only a minority of visitors ever bothered with configuration – and few of those went beyond specifying their location, for local news and weather. Though nothing is being ruled out for future iterations, for now the BBC is relying more on editorial direction than the wisdom of the crowd to keep its visitors’ attention.
Beta testing of the new bbc.co.uk will run for around two months before the old site is switched off.
