Website Of The Week – BBC News

http://news.bbc.co.uk/

Last week the BBC launched its 24-hour online news service BBC News, just days before the unveiling of its News 24 service on cable and late night BBC channels. Amidst the rumpus surrounding News 24’s pre-launch difficulties, the online BBC News has received very little attention. In fact there does seem to be a prevailing acceptance that it is sufficient simply to have a Website regardless of whether it is actually any good or not. Because of this companies announcing their new media expansions are two to a penny. Often, though, all this means is that they have acquired some Webspace and dropped some information in there to fester for three months until the next update (the Government’s Website was recently criticised for still displaying the names of ministries which were abolished in May).

The BBC however, is surely a different story. Sadly, not entirely. The one thing you would expect from BBC News is that it would be very regularly updated. More regularly say, than the television bulletins. Otherwise it becomes redundant as an immediate medium. Unfortunately, the site isn’t updated particularly often and changes made are often very minor. For example the UK Companies business results section did not feature many of the results published today. Also, a story in the business section which ran yesterday appeared in the same section again today and today’s business section didn’t appear at all until late in the morning. For a service which is supposedly updated 24 hours a day this represents a fair wait. To add to the confusion the page often needs to be reloaded a number of times before the latest update is displayed. This can make navigating the site frustrating.

Despite all this the BBC News site is a decent source of UK and World news. It would benefit, however, from a clearer design allowing it to be negotiated more quickly and easily. A bit of technical tweeking to enable the pages to automatically refresh wouldn’t go amiss either.