Rants and Ramblings: random commentary about culture, media, politics, technology and whatnot.

news website redesigns

ESPN and BBC News both recently redesigned their web sites.

ESPN’s redesign applies mainly to its home page. The site is now pushing a new feature called “ESPN Motion,” which integrates full-motion ESPN video clips into the page. The feature, which appears to incorporate both Windows Media Player and Flash, requires a special plugin. Right now, ESPN Motion is only being offered to PC users with high-speed connections. I’m intrigued, but didn’t feel like downloading the plugin last night.

In terms of likes / dislikes:

The ESPN Motion promo is very cool. However, I don’t know that dial-up users are going to want to wait to download a promo for a feature they can’t use. I do like the tabs (photos / espn motion / top story) at the top of the feature story slot, allowing a good deal of flexibility in the content of that prime bit of real estate. Adrian Holovaty points out that aside from the MSN framework, the design is tableless, defined by CSS rather than cumbersome table code. Holovaty also points to a pure-CSS “lite” version of the ESPN home page, but you’re only normally directed there if you don’t have Flash or a non standards-compliant browser.

Meanwhile, I’m debating about how I feel about the BBC News redesign. Being BBC News, the redesign is still pretty conservative, and not overly dramatic. They’ve widened their pages (now targeted at 800x600 displays) and can display more text / headlines at a time on the screen. I guess my complaint with the new look is that it’s just so … white. It’s most jarring on the home page, with only white space between columns of text. And the tan color they used for the left rail seemed warmer somehow than the gray they’re using now. Those complaints aside, though, the site looks as clean and crisp as ever. They’re using a stylesheet now, too, but not full-stop — They’re still using table code, too. (However, they’re defining font sizes in pixels, apparently. That allows them more control over the layout, but annoys folks who want to enlarge the type.)