The BBC website team have recently rolled out the latest in a long line of new homepage redesigns with the intention of, "making the [home]page more relevant to a broader audience".

Now, I don't know about you, but I definitely preferred the last one and still can't get my head around this new version even after a good few weeks of using it.

In my role as a Digital Creative here at Spider Online I'm tasked with creating websites for a wide variety of clients ranging from large corporate websites to small micro-sites and mobile sites.

As such, I can see what the BBC are trying to achieve with their new homepage.

It's been built to reflect the growing trend towards touch screen interfaces such as those found on smart phones and tablet devices where we can all quite happily swipe, pinch and flick our way about the screen.

However, on the desktop version of the site I just don't think that this approach really hits the mark.

Obviously it's fine for websites to have sliders, accordions and other nice interactive touches for the user to play with if they enhance the user experience.

I just feel that the BBC have maybe taken this idea a step too far. Presenting pretty much everything on the homepage in this way just gives me a sore head!

For me the new design just doesn't present the information I'm looking for in a clear and concise manner which should be the main concern for the BBC's user experience design team.

It seems as if they've been more concerned with adding bells and whistles and making things slide about the page rather than concentrate on taking care of the core business of delivering news (and other information) to the user with a minimum of fuss and with a simple, intuitive navigation system.

Up until now I've been a big fan of the BBC desktop website and also their excellent mobile site and I hope that I'll be able to say that again in the future, but for now I'm sad to say it's a big thumbs down from me.

By Billy Moat
Digital Creative, Spider Online