The first thing I noticed about the UK BBC News website was its color palette. I have always associated BBC News with the color red since that was their color theme on television. The home page of the site, however, is a neutral yet attractive pewter-grey. All of the text and labels on the home page are either white or some shade of this pewter-grey. The overall effect is very sleek. Clicking on the various news sections, such as weather and sports, opens a new page with a color theme that is different to the home page, but there does not seem to be a strategy or pattern behind the color choices. For instance, News and Weather are both the same red theme, but Sports is a slightly different shade of red. I think that more specific color choices for each section could make the site feel more unified.
The site is easy to navigate – clicking on the ‘NEWS’ heading opens up the news page, and from each new page that is opened, it is easy to get back to the home page via the ‘HOME’ tab at the top of the page. The BBC covers many topics, so, for instance, clicking on the ‘WEATHER’ heading will open the main weather page, and from there it is possible to access several other pages associated with weather. However, no matter how many different weather pages one opens, the heading ‘WEATHER’ is always at the top, so it is easy to tell where one is in the architecture of the site. On the home page, the box containing the top news stories of the day is placed at the top, and is larger than the other boxes, suggesting that it is a more popular link for people who visit bbc.co.uk. The look of the links on the home page does not change once they have been clicked on.
The UK BBC site uses only sans-serif typography in a variety of weights and sizes which makes it easy to distinguish the headlines from the body text, and also adds to the overall sleek, modern look of the site. In some cases, however, it is difficult to tell the difference between smaller, finer text that is in fact a link to something else, and text that is not. I would improve this by giving the links a different color to the neutral pewter-grey. I might also try to incorporate a serif font in the body text to see if it balances well with the sans-serif of the headings.
On each page that I click on, the first thing I notice is the colored bar across the top of the page that features the name of that page, like ‘SPORTS’. I think this is because the bar extends across the entire page and its color contrasts with the otherwise neutral palette of the rest of the page. If the page features a photograph, I notice that next. Each page seems to have a grid structure but it does not stay consistent from page to page.
The site seems more inclined to feature photos rather than symbols. The photos are in color and they seem to be of high quality, which gives the entire page a more sophisticated look. Personally, I would prefer the photos, especially those for the top news stories, to be a little bit larger than they are.
In my opinion, the purpose of this site is to deliver large amounts of daily news and information to people in a sleek, organized way. I think the neutral and simple color palette prevents the site from looking too overwhelming, since there are dozens of different links to other pages. There is a search engine at the top of the home page which allows one to search either the BBC or the entire web by typing either a word or a string of words in the search box, which I find useful. However, the most useful aspect of the site, in my opinion, is the way that the news is organized according to country, and after clicking on the 'NEWS' heading, it is possible specify which country or region you'd like to read about simply by locating it in the navigation bar on the left.
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