Two months ago, the BBC relaunched their homepage and started the journey to giving their whole website a more consistent look and feel. The homepage has been warmly received, with its widgets, personalisation, Web 2.0 look and feel, accessibility, standards compliance and, of course, a Flash version of the BBC continuity clock of our youth.

At the same time they made the step to move from a left-aligned 800×600-friendly template, to one that was centred and required at least a 1024×768 screen resolution.

The BBC website is a federation of websites, all housed under the bbc.co.uk domain, but managed by an array of internal departments and external producers. It will therefore probably take many years before there is a consistent look and feel across the board, and by then we will be into a whole new web design meme and everyone will have to start again. Indeed, if you know where to look, there are plenty of old sites lurking about under the bbc.co.uk domain.

The people behind the new /programmes section of the website were the next to announce a redesign to bring them into line with the new homepage look and feel.

Next to be tackled was the BBC news website. This was less warmly received. Put simply (and I’m sure there was much more to it than this), they had taken the existing template, stretched it to the new width and added the new standard header and footer. In my view, the result had way too much white space, and didn’t match the designs being rolled out elsewhere. Their argument for a collection of tweaks rather than a complete redesign had been that their users had told them that they liked the current design and didn’t want the BBC to change much.

A number of amendments followed in the days after the redesign, including a reduction in the amount of white space and the restoration of links for weather and sport. It still doesn’t appeal to me, however, not being quite the old site or a new site; I think it is still due a proper redesign.

Other sites on the BBC to have been redesigned in line with the new templates include /help, 1xtra, and the annoyingly-trendily-pointless BBC Three.

On Thursday afternoon, the BBC relaunched its blogs website. The primary purpose was, they state, to upgrade to a new software platform and improve the reliability and integration of the commenting system. What’s really odd is that they have completely missed the opportunity to redesign the section in line with the new look and feel. Maybe it’s a two stage project, with backend first and presentation second, but it seems something of a missed opportunity.

Photo: Robin Hamman on Flickr. Used under licence.