assessing the collective

12 May, 2004

I’ve been meaning to finish this post for about a week and a half now, but time constraints mean that I’ve not been able to do so. Nevertheless, for your perusal, a non-insightful look into a BBC redesign…

Two weeks ago the BBC Collective site fundamentally changed its layout. Like the rest of BBC site it’s all-table based and therefore obviously hideous but the new design is a lot easier on the eye as well as being easier to navigate due to better delineation of content.

Menu headings are clearly coloured orange which contrasts well with the green (just what is that colour?) and attract the eye. The clear border and white background of the main content section presents a much more professional appearance as well as making the text much easier to read.

![some of the new icons on collective](http://philwilson.org/images/collective-montage.png "some of the new icons on collective")The new icons are much clearer

Despite the use of tables for laying out the pages CSS has been used for the rest of the presentation – all fonts, backgrounds and borders are separately maintained in a number of CSS files. There are also several styles defined inline in the <head> section of the page but as they’re probably part of a global template I think we can let them off.

Bright and colourful icons have been used to decorate pull-out boxes such as “talk about this?”, and its good to see some common sense used in what iconography they’ve used. No abstract concepts here: standard imagery for sound and video are used, lightbulbs for help, envelopes for mail, and so on.

The help has become a lot more obvious, and it’s much easier to find your way around and move between sections without feeling as though you’ve accidentally got lost (as I found true on the old site), and the actions you can take to contribute to the site are also better highlighted by good use of colour and icons.

I think the guys and girls behind Collective should be really pleased with the changes they’ve made; I’ve been signed up for quite a while but never used it because I never knew what I was supposed to be doing, where to go or what to do.

See my BBC Collective profile.