CBC.ca launches redesigned site
CBC.ca has a new design — more streamlined, and puts reader comments front and centre. The front main news page even includes a way to see the most-blogged stories from CBC.
Very pretty, though sadly the main Radio page still sucks (and has our old logos). Compare it against the main TV page and you’ll see the difference. (CBC.ca’s funding comes primarily from the television division. Coicidence? <grin>)
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That’s not the CBC.ca main page, that’s cbc.ca/news. Check out /sports too if you haven’t already.
As for /radio, not too much to say on that one, but that’s really not the reason!
Oops – thanks! Fixed.
Alright already! All you Radio lovers will have lots to be proud of soon. Very soon. This new News landing page (and Sports) is just a taste of things to come.
Radio is being fully relaunched in a few weeks time along with an exciting new look for the home page of CBC.ca in addition to coverage of the FIFA Under 20 tournament.
All of this will be communicated in an official way then so that our audience is aware of all of the changes and ways that they can be part of the new CBC.ca features.
As we’re really working hard to engage with our audience to bring them the best of what the CBC has to offer every day, we’re spending some time “behind the scenes” on changes to the way we produce content for the site.
Stay tuned for great new features, sharper branding and a simpler way to find all of your favourite Radio programming and more.
Steve
Yeah, Tod. Lay off radio new media. Less than 5 people maintain over 90 per cent of radio sites on CBC.ca.
When they’re not busy building new stuff, they’re supporting show producers when they muck up basic updates (cbc.ca/nerd anyone?).
To a web designer: does the fact that radio gets only 12 per cent of the CBC’s budget have anything to do with it?
Ward: Touche.
Argh, the video should be Flash instead of WMP. Although, I am a Mac user and support for Windows Media have gone nowhere.
How do you turn that weather thing on the news page off!?
That said, I know the folks in radio online will be pleased as punch to have a better presence!
Not like it wasn’t on our radar for ages!
Just wanted to point out that the /television page is actually not supported by television any more (although technically, of course, TV revenue does still help fund new media and everything else here). Although it was originally launched and produced through a television production group (“Hosted Prime”), once that department folded last year it went back to cbc.ca.
So it’s actually minimally supported right now. And it hasn’t been redesigned or developed in years. In fact, its functionality and features have decreased over the last year significantly.
Furthermore, /radio has been included in the plans for relaunch – it will look and function substantially differently from (ie. better than) the current page.
The /television page has not been included in the first phase of the relaunches. So I wouldn’t put too much stock in theories about how those pages reflect current structures.
I should know – I ran the /television page for 4 years!
Gabriel why do you want to turn off the weather ???
Gabriel: you can’t currently turn the weather widget off. Why do you want to? (I’m not being a smartass, it would really be good to know.)
Will this new cbcnewsy.ca address break the millions of links out there to older stories?
What about the archives?
It has been suggested that having a new address will make CBC disappear from hundreds, hundreds of millions? computers. Google will never catch up and that the reader/viewer doesn’t care any more about the links to stories on their web pages/blogs/what-have-you.
And is this all accessible to the blind and handicapped or only to the fleet of mouse and new windows users?
WRT broken links, that won’t happen. We haven’t made any changes that will break existing links, and a great deal of effort goes into making sure that news links continue to work indefinitely. Any changes we make to our URL structure have to take account of that requirement.
(Mind you, that’s not always a good thing – last snow day, we had to pull and edit a snowday story from 2003 because it listed a school contact number that had since changed, and a distraught member of the public was getting a dozen calls an hour from people who’d googled the story!)
Accessibility remains a definite issue. I don’t know enough to talk about it, but it is a valid question that should be addressed…
Kev, David:
I figured how to block it using Firefox’s “Stylish” plugin. The reason is that I use an adblocker, so when I loaded the CBC News website, I saw this huge white bar at the top, with a weather box in the corner. It didn’t look very nice.
Ever since your radio2 program change,(which I’m not crazy about) there are interuptions every so often. Is this because of faulty equipment or is it by design?
Gabriel: Someone else in the office pointed this out to me after I posted. Unfortunately I doubt there’s going to be much support for removing it to make the page work better when people block our ads! But it’s good to hear you found a solution.
Gabriel:
Im sure you can remove it the same way you remove the ads. Find out what the style/div tag is called and use the css “hide” method.
Someone over at alt.radio…cbc says that the sports results are pranged.
“….Ever since CBC unveiled its revised website sports section this past
Monday, one which apparently uses a new source for stats, I’ve been e-
mailing the ‘contact us’ address to express my disappointment and to
assert the need to revert back to the old format. Simply put, the new
layout is unnecessarily cumbersome and its individual player entries
for all sports have been condensed to basic statistics, with nothing
about where a player might fit into a team’s schematic, perceived
strengths and weaknesses, etc. “
Did someone say new Radio page?
Let the bashing begin!