BBC Website Overspend

In the news this week is the apparent overspend by the BBC on the development of their new website.

Now I would certainly not be the first to acknowledge that the new website is the pinnacle of what we as developers look for in modern web design, pretty much everything about it is fantastic. But should it have really cost £85.1 million to do it? There are many reports in the tabloids at the moment claiming the BBC overspent by as much as £36 million (Source: The Guardian); however the figure I'm more likely to be convinced by is what was stated by Dame Patricia Hodgson that the BBC exceeded their budget by approximately £3.5 million.

Either way I find it hard to believe that the amount paid was worth it, I know I certainly would be a very happy man if I were working for the BBC web development team and got handed an amount as substantial as what some of the team must have got.

There is no doubt in my mind that the new website is brilliant, the whole look and feel of the site is above and beyond the old one. The use of whitespace is much improved; the whole design feels a lot less cluttered and they made the somewhat logical step to abandon compatibility with legacy screen resolutions. The new BBC iPlayer is astounding; It certainly comes in use when I want to quench my thirst for Dr Who when usually I have missed the show on Saturday evenings. In addition to this, the BBC News site is so much more user-friendly now, I can spend a lot of time browsing it now that I don't get aggravated by the small fixed width, left-aligned design. The interactivity of the new site is also a big selling point in my opinion. I'm a big fan of AJAX, which is used a lot around the new site, allowing the user to fully customise their experience on the site easily without reloading the page; and also allowing the BBC to obtain more information about how their users navigate their site and therefore develop around those needs. The simple use of pastel colours and slight gradient also contributes to making the design near perfect and a complete joy to use.

I have only one criticism of the new site and that is due to the fact that as of yet they have not achieved full XHTML compliance. The new homepage blew me away when I quickly ran it through a validator to find that despite the VERY advanced functionality e.g. the ability to customise your own user experience with the site by moving around content divs and the suchlike whilst still maintaining validity. It is just a shame that whilst they have indeed updated the News and other sections of the site to the same design, they have not bothered making it valid- with most pages returning anywhere in excess of 300 markup errors.

'Call for controls on BBC website' - BBC News Article