If it ain't broke, improve it until it is

[innocent_lex]

So sayeth Dilbert. And the BBC News website people, apparently. The 'new look' is nasty, white everywhere, can't read anything on Firefox because the font's too tiny (except in the places where it's too big - random changes in the middle of articles), huge headers at the top for no reason, I'll never be able to use it on the wee laptop because sideways scrolling will drive me nutso (yes, it's a fixed width) and they've brought in pale blue and grey fonts to keep their 20-something readership happy while everyone else just gets a headache. Apparently nobody at the BBC has heard of good web design or standards compliance. Oy.

I used to not be all that bothered about the fact that I paid a massive licence fee to the BBC and hardly ever watched anything on their channels because I used the website a lot. Not any more - the changes are enough to send me somewhere, anywhere, else.

So, anyone have any recs for decent, readable news sites?

Comments

[graculus.livejournal.com]

I too was distinctly underwhelmed to pop over to BBC news this morning and discover it was... just wrong, really. :(

[innocent-lex.livejournal.com]

There have been over 1600 responses to the editor's blog on this, and the vast majority (I'd guess around 95%) of those responses are negative.

[carole-london.livejournal.com]

Pale blues and greys seem to be the new black. Someone in my office did a great Powerpoint presentation (which I wanted to steal!) but it was mostly in lovely blues and greys. It was very very pretty - and you couldn't read it on the page, let alone when projected. I went through and changed all the text to black, bold, and it looked, well, even better, because you could actually read the content!

[innocent-lex.livejournal.com]

Reading is overrated. Content is overrated. Good coding is overrated. As long as it's pretty and shiny, surely that's enough for a news site?

[sazandra.livejournal.com]

So it's not just me that finds the revamp awful to look at and read. I've tried using the text-only/low graphics version of the news pages but it only includes some of the content of the graphics version.

It's not just the BBC that have revamping things, so has Yahoo. I just logged into my Yahoo email and get a revamped Yahoo homepage - I just want the email page not all the other stuff. Have just logged out of that then back in again, it's now going straight to the email page again so why are they messing about with it? Grrrrrrrrrrr