The BBC have launched their new styled homepage (bbc.co.uk). In keeping with current ‘Web 2.0‘ trends they have introduced a ‘drag and drop’ interface that enables you to customise the homepage to suit your needs.

Comparing it to the old design, the new homepage comes across much more sleek and clean with large typeface and more visual content.

If you don’t like the colour scheme that they supply (it changes depending on the top right ‘advert’ image), you can customise it to your choice.

You can enter your location and it automatically tailors the content to your area - local news, weather and radio. If you don’t like the default elements you can choose to add others e.g. Blogs, Sport, Technology, BBC iPlayer, TV listings. If you don’t like the position of the elements you can ‘drag and drop’ these to different places on the page.

There are many different combinations to play with and if you get lost and you don’t like your creation, you can reset the homepage to it’s original default settings.

In order for your settings to stay the same, a cookie is placed within your browser so your preferences are loaded on each visit. With some users this could mean that they have to lower their browser security settings - which in some cases has deferred users from using the site.

Currently the news design is only present on the homepage but the development team have commented that they are looking at scaling out the design to the rest of the (incredibly large!) website.

All in all, I think this is a bold and adventurous but worthwhile change - the last homepage design was 8 years ago!