CBC British Columbia is the first region to get a spanky new web site. The design has borrowed heavily from the main cbcnews.ca web site.
No surprise that B.C. is the first region — Vancouver is the initial launch city for the myCBC project, CBC’s exploration into citizen-generated content.
What do you think of the new design?
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| B.C. Interior, CBC.ca web site, Vancouver |
It’s a bit ironic that CBC should be introducing wide-screen news, since the newly designed web pages don’t accomodate wide-screen monitors at all.
On my very wide screen I get only a fraction of the left side used. Surely the CBC’s Web designers can do better than this.
–Bob.
(I tried to put an image into the comment, but no go. And Tod, can you get rid of the Javascrippled preview and submit buttons? Ordinary buttons are good enough for me…)
Like the main site, the regional site looks clean and nice but loses a lot in functionality.
The problem is the left (main) column. First there’s a main story, then there’s three boxes whose purpose is unclear. Are they more headlines? Features? Sections of the site? Popular stories? How are they chosen?
Then there’s “B.C. Headlines”, with links for popular stories and an RSS feed. Perfect.
Then there’s “Your View” and “Your Questions” which have an odd whitespace issue but are otherwise ok.
Then we go back to the three boxes, with three lines of text, all formatted differently. How are these three boxes different from the three boxes we’ve already seen? Why are they not together? What is their purpose? Why are there three larger boxes underneath? Are they more important stories? Or do they just have better pictures?
And then we’re back to the smaller boxes.
It’s all a lot of clutter. If I’m at a regional site, I want regional headlines, and probably some information about regional programming. Separate it into sections, use photos, but keep it linear. This format doesn’t make it easy to scan.
More thoughts in my blog post after the main CBC.ca redesign.
I loved the old bc website. My biggest dissapointment in the new page is that the top stories from Canada/The World/Arts/Sports and whatnot have been removed. It used to be one stop shopping on cbc.ca/bc now I’m going to be clicking everywhere to find something I might want to read.
It’s funny I thought when I first looked at the page those top other story links were still there but they are gone today.
Bob,
What do you mean by wide screen?
It is designed for a 1024 screen resolution. If your screen is higher, it will look like the right has space… all websites in 1024 will be displayed the same way.
Hi Fred: I view display up to 3300 pixels horizontally on this computer. On another computer I can only view 800 pixels horizontally, and the right side is cut off. Yes, there’s a horizontal scroll bar, but that’s near impossible to use.
A well-designed Web site isn’t constrained to a single screen resolution. By using relative width values (for example, style=”width: 50%;”) it’s possible to have nice columnar formats that work on any screen resolution.
Have a search for “variable width” at The Web Standards Project.
–Bob.
Has anyone noticed how useless the My Region button is on cbc.ca? It is all over the place but just takes you to the Canada page.