BBC News and Sport visual refresh
31 March 2008
The biggest news and sport sites in Europe, BBC News and BBC Sport refreshed the look of their respective sites earlier today.
BBC Sport Interactive’s Ben Gallop explains in his blog that the reason for change was brought upon because of the need to “ensure we have a website that can better showcase the fantastic sporting content BBC Sport has to offer”. Lab 7 were tasked with making this happen from a visual perspective for the sport site.
Together with it’s sister site, BBC News, the sport site has also moved to a wider layout, which not only brings it into line with other areas of the BBC, but allows the designs to feature more white space, making things easier to digest.
This larger page width also enables the use of bigger images, meaning editorial staff can now really capture the essense of an event with clearer, more dynamic pictures.
To enable the BBC’s quality audio and video content to be consumed by as many people as possible, these have now been placed in stories, which also features a wider page grid.
As the project is a refresh, not everything has changed. To ensure user familiarity, certain aspects have stayed the same or only endured minor changes – the left hand nav for instance has just received a minor update, a fresh lick of paint as it were.
The changes wont stop with this refresh though – over the coming weeks more functionality will appear, and the design will gradually be rolled out across the full site.