Launching the new BBC Sport website

Not content with creating an awful Home page, you now wreck the Football pages. It is as if you are deliberately sabotaging your own assets.

Well I think it's great. Was only last night toggling between sports with hundreds of clicks so pleased it is easier. Looks great too. PS How on earth do two types of rugby trump cycling?

The bbc sport football webpage has been my homepage for the past 5-6 years now! Browsers came and went but the homepage for me remained the same =) It's quite refreshing to see some changes. It will take some getting used to on my part but I am sure once the transition phase is over I will get to appreciate the new design! =)

I see a lot of good changes but the sheer amount of yellow is overwhelming. Please look at toning this down.

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Congratulations, it looks horrible. Setting Sky Sports as my home page instead of BBC football now.

Hi the new site looks great, I was hoping i would be able to watch the Football Manager interviews on my ipad but still not, when will you switch this to html 5?

Thanks

Finally. I'm really glad this has been done. :) Just two comments:

1. The yellow banner image at the top doesn't stretch to the end of my 1080p monitor.
2. Why is there a /0/ at the end of the URL?

As per Josh, why are the URLs including /sport/0/ instead of just /sport/ which looks much cleaner? I'm sure when it was briefly on the beta site it was possible to still view the pages if you removed the '0' from the URLs.

Awful redesign of the user front end, but if you are enabling content provision through leveraged technology then you are making a step forward.

Would like to see more user customisation in the page elements, as I really don't care about football but I have 30% of my screen real estate devoted to it. So I would like to filter the homepage to delivery my desired content.

Also one question - why black on yellow on white. Black on Yellow or Yellow on Black works (as road signs and airport signage attest to) - but dropping these elements onto a white background makes a huge contrast.

Did the BBC test this scheme in respect to eye strain ?

Just because you have a wide range and a lot of content, does not mean you should have to cram it all into the home\landing pages, that narrow middle column is just a silly addition which is hardly legible.

Why didn't you take a proper step back, ask for user opinions and do it properly with an incredible simple site that was easier to navigate and easier to find content.

The new look and layout looks like you have taken a huge step back in time and tried to copy the old Setanta 'black on yellow' look. It just doesn't work.

It's a shame you have such strong and skilled developers to hand but fall short in the IA department.

1.) Why are your designs specifically optimised for iPad owners? Surely they are not the largest section of your user-base? I'm not saying they should be excluded, but the layout doesn't flow well on my 1280 x 1024 monitors.
2.) Yellow and Black doesn't work well at all. Think about it, those two colours in nature indicate danger, as they do on road signs in other parts of the world. At best it looks like someone's hacked the JCB website and switched in a load of sport content. Granted Yellow and Black are the BBC Sport colours, but if you must include yellow then try and make it a more subtle.
3.) A bit more padding between content would be nice as you've removed any fine borders from the content area.
4.) HTML5 would be great for video content for iPad owners like me. I'd much rather the videos worked than the design was optimised for my device, the old BBC Sport site was fine on an iPad, the videos were not.
5.) The on hover change in the top menu from black to white looks a bit like an after thought.
6.) Olympics section on the homepage (lower down) is perhaps a bit premature?

Of your redesigned pages the news ones are good-ish, the weather acceptable and the sport pages rather nasty.

Ta

I really like how this has turned out. Much like News Online, you get the impression that a serious amount of thought and effort that has gone into this project. It really does show. I love how this site takes the GEL guidelines to a new level too; I get a sense that your teams are starting to push the visual language, and are coming up with decidedly original creations. It doesn't always work however; the home page and 2012 site have possibly pushed it too far!

I've asked this on the latest open post, but perhaps here is a good place to ask too: what the thinking behind the masthead/site navigation changing colour on hover (and on page load too, strangely). That the behaviour has been documented on the GEL website (https://www.bbc.co.uk/gel/web/foundations/masthead/masthead-footer%29 seems to suggest it's here to stay.

Early impressions from some of my friends: "It's almost as if they've thought 'we can't be arsed to design a dark version of the masthead'", and "Are you seeing that too? I thought it was broken".

I'm genuinely curious to hear the reasoning behind such a decision; isn't this behaviour going to be jarring for users? It's certainly jarring for me.

Thanks,

Paul

The angry wasp look is psychologically offputting. Black on mid-yellow ground is, in colour combination standards for signs, an indication of caution ("indicative of a potentially hazardous situation which, if not avoided, may result in minor or moderate injury"). Suggest try a subdued cream tone.

I'm not convinced of the need for the rollover colour inversion on the BBC masthead, and such an inversion is ergonomically inconsistent with the rest of the site. It smacks of CSS 'doing it for the sake of doing it'.

Congratulations though on getting a GEL-compliant frame width. If only the rest of BBC Online would do the same!

And thanks for not adopting any more 'tragic roundabouts'.

Russ

What's up with the masthead? It's of a completely different style to the usual one, and the colour change when you mouseover it is really jarring. Why the change?

When it’s not broken don’t fix it, I’m actually quite upset by this, but i shouldn’t be too surprised as the BBC have a fantastic track record of screwing things up. I've argued for years about BBC sport being far superior to any other news website, unfortunately i cannot stand this new layout as it’s not as easy to use and i don’t even want to waste my time trying to work it out, the yellow is disgusting.

Goodbye BBC sport and hello Sky sports news.

#shootyourselfinthefoot

It's OK, but certainly no better than the site it replaced, which of course begs the question - Why do it? As others have said, there's far too much yellow.

Nowhere near as bad as the new BBC home page (which I no longer use), but it wasn't broken, so why "fix" it.

To use football parlance (albeit slightly tounge in cheek!) - "ya don't know what ya doin....", "your're not fit to re-design....", "stand up if the sites too bright...."

and for me the primary reason for doing a redesign - html5 ?????

@9 Cait ORiordan: Thanks for the reply. Surely though it would be possible to hide the '/0' from public URLs by the use of mod_rewrite. I'm assuming the two different publishing systems are the one hosted on the news sub-domain and the other is on the new /sport URL.

The colour scheme is horrible. The amount of yellow is completely over the top, disorientating and quite clearly not the best choice. Fix that and you may have a half-way decent section, not any better than what was there so entirely pointless but if you are going to change things at least do it with the end user in mind.

The formula 1 site looks rather out of place with it's black header & background, compared to the rest of the site with it's 'BBC Sport' yellow header & white background.

Having read the blog and seen the diet the designers are on (high in sugar and colourants and no doubt caffeine) this would explain the messy, cluttered, amateur looking, phsycadelic, 'in your face' design of the new sports pages. This will be another BBC page removed from my bookmarks. The list now includes the homepage, weather page, programme pages, radio pages. At the moment only the news page can be tolerated and that is only to get the news as the design there is poor also. It would seem that the design plan entails have as much glaring , headache inducing white space as possible, cram as much stuff on the page as possible, make the users scroll more, make it harder for people to find the content they want to read, make it look like a retro early 1990s design, make the page so busy the user gets confused and clicks the back button to get them out of there as quickly as possible.

The only saving grace is that the tragic roundabout (carousel) has not been implemented yet on the sport page but I fear that is only a matter of time. My parents who are in their seventies and have just started using the internet, no longer use the BBC pages either as they find them too confusing, messy and cluttered. My mum took one look at the new design and said 'yeuch' what is that? She has removed the BBC from her bookmarks.

Realy disappointed with the way the BBC's online pressence is heading, even more so as I am forced to pay for it and have no choice even though I can now no longer use the service. Perhaps that is the BBC's plan to force people to use commercial alternatives through really bad design?

Sorry, but it is absolutely terrible.

Who thought it'd be a good idea to have that enormous yellow bar? It looks like Windows when you switch it to high contrast / visually impaired settings. The yellow overload throughout the design also makes it hard to pick out the actual content.

The football match report pages are particularly terrible. The way the text flows around those "Did You Know?" boxes and video boxes renders the whole thing difficult to read.

Text sizes are also all over the shop. Why is the text in "this story around the web" and "related to this story" so disproportionately large?

And why the rollover effect on the top banner?

I'm not moaning for the sake of it, and don't want to sound like I'm being histrionic, but this is truly horrible. What a shame.

Ouch. A redesign of the page was probably overdue, but that sickening bar of yellow at the top - is it really necessary? Garish. What's wrong with the red that was there before?
Look at the search box at the top right-hand corner....it just looks bad in all-black. You really should allow us to vote on these changes before dumping them on us.

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE do not let those responsible for the new Home Page and Sports Page loose on the BBC News page. That has been my browser home page for many years. If you turn that into the cluttered mess that the home page and sports pages have become, I will have to go elsewhere, and I really don't want to do that as the quality of the content is second to none.

One word:

AWFUL

Not content with ruining the main BBC website, you have made the sport website almost unusable. The layout and especially the colours are hideous.

The BBC website used to be the shining example of how good a website could (and should) be. It is rapidly descending into an example of how NOT to present information.

I get the impression that there are a bunch of BBC IT techies who are constantly pursuading senior management that they desperately need to redesign the website to ensure they remain in their cosy jobs.

NEWSFLASH: It wasn't broken and didn't need fixing.

I am sure the content is as good as it ever was, but the presentation is unbearably bad. I for one will be using other websites for my news and sport content in future.

What exactly is the thinking behind that horrible colour changing navigation bar? It's so amateurish and 2004 DHTMLesq.

Other than that there is definitely a sign of improvement. Much prefer the layout of the articles with the big images and overlapping headline to those with video however.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/rugby-union/16786581 this page, frankly, is a disaster. Things are completely mislaigned and nothing flows. Compared to this page https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/rugby-union/16824230 where it works really nicely.

Also not sure about the small central column on the homepage. To be it just seems to clutter things up and make the homepage look messy.

Still I'm sure things will improve once its been going a bit longer. The news website is vastly improved since day one (and I was one of the people who actually liked the News relaunch).

I like it, but changing the colour of the main site links from black to white is awful. Please just keep it black - the colour hints are sufficient.

Massive improvement form a navigational and design perspective. I find the landing page for each sport and subsequent sub-section overwhelming. Just a barrage of information, needs reducing and delivering in stages or smaller chunks. Like the new global masthead interaction rollover, but the inverse is too harsh and the black-white thing makes it look like text & divides are 'jumping'. More subtle state change would resolve this. Yet to test on phone/tablet but assuming there are big improvements there too? Overall a great job, well done BBC team!

The colours are terrible, from a web developers point of view I wouldn't allow that search box (in black !) out of my studio never mind the thin headlines section.

You can't even navigate anywhere quickly anymore. Can't find Championship football anywhere quickly.

Sorry guys but this is a major failure. Hope you didn't pay the website company muich

Where is the section on Europen football leagues please?
Where is teh section for Conference N & S please?

Not all links can be opened in a new page, making my habit of "marking" pages to read later redundant, so I have to juam all over the place now.

Fix these and it's a great job.

Sorry it looks horrid. Just like the main pages it seems to have been designed for idiots. Everything is so big, that important stories and links are a long way down. On the football pages why does so much fluff come above the important stuff like like League 1 and League 2 links? Who cares about tweets? (Having a link to What are tweets is quite laughable!).

Some people on here are just being negative for negatives sake, but i must admit people are making some valid points.

My main concern is just how busy the Sports homepage is, there's an insane amount of links on there! Pictures all over the shop and all different sizes, the headlines in a column down the middle is a weird choice (especially considering theres a ton more in the bottom left!), and just the amount of content squashed onto one page is mind boggling.

The only things that really need to be there are the headlines, sport on iplayer, scores/results/fixtures and comment + analysis. The rest should really be minor asides.

It just looks like it needs slimming down a lot, being able to access the whole websites content with one click isn't necessarily a good thing. How about allowing some customisation or putting in the option to minimise some of the aspects of the page. For a front page theres a lot to scroll through right now.

That said, there are positives. The new S/R/F box is nicely done with the drop down style (something the front page could use more of), the colour scheme could be good with a bit of tweaking (a bit less yellow, a bit more of that nice blue along the top) and the sport selection toolbar along the top is good.

So yeh, some good, but it really needs to be more customisable and a lot of the content should be minimisable and more clearly defined. At the moment it's all a bit of a jumble. Early days though, and the site was certainly due a redesign.

Its a bit yellow. Well, its a lot yellow.

Also, why is there no customisation feature? I really only want to read football related story's, especially SPL story's. Not really interested in ping pong, running and cricket.

well done for changing what was a visually stunning and highly navigatable site into a complete and utter garish mess.

the new site is horrible and unreadable. you have all these experts but they have completely ignored the basics of website design- readability and ease of navigation. its not easire to find things AT ALL, the pages look cluttered and are hard to read. we dont need 3 different font sizez for 1 story, we donnt need non linear text that doesnt flow properly because its being interrupted by snippets. go back to e drawing board or feel the wrath of people who pay the wages i.e us the licence fee payer. the bbs sports site used to be better than sky now its the other way around!! and people will not be visiting the site if they find it hard to read and hard to find things.

I like the philosophy "if it aint broke dont fix it!" and even though it looks like you were trying to improve the site I find it has become more of a mess.

I liked looking at all the European clubs tables/fixtures/results and the North and South conference info too. Its disappointing to see that disappear.

Its shame that even the (waste of money) Olympics has somehow influenced its corruption on the football page.

I'll give this a week but if things don't improve i'll be removing this from my bookmark page.

Sorry about my harsh criticism but I assume your paid to take it.

@34: If you're just interested in one sport, you can just go to the page for that sport - in your case football. No real need for customisation, in my opinion.

Firstly, I like the changes... more modern in look and feel.

My question relates to the black navigation bar at the top of the page and then the lower navigation bars. There is/was the GEL (style guide) that all pages should follow, but it seems that every section of the BBC website that gets updated, the navigation bars gets tweaked and changed so that there is now little consistency across the BBC internet platform (e.g. new sport, news, weather, travel etc). Why is this?

I have just registered specifically to tell you how terrible the new website is. It's like something a teenager would have designed in 1998.

The only problem with the Sport website is the clumsy layout of items. Video should be at the top of the right hand column and headlines should have a clear hierarchy like on the news page.

The newer website relaunches (Homepage, 2012 (the bottom half of the page needs work), programmes (too many moving panels) and Sport) seem to be following new GEL guidelines (including that awful new masthead) - undermining the concept of universal design principles. An application of those used on the news site would help to solve many of the problems listed above.

So horribly glaring I closed the webpage immediately. A re-design could have written in HTML5 to allow iPad users access to BBC Sports webpages, but no, it seems to havE been written to induce vomitting instead. Does nobody check things before they are published at the BBC, or is the person who checks colour-blind?

It's not very good on a small monitor - you get to see the huge picture on the left, and then two comments in the squeezed middle column. Three things in total!

The black and white is weird, I thought this banner was supposed to be consistent?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/formula1/

This is MUCH better. The majority of black in the background is easier on the eye. In addition, the black bar is far greater than the yellow bar. The Formula One page looks considerably sleeker whilst the Football page, which is of course the most visited, looks like it could learn something.

I don't ever comment on blogs, but i had just had and contribute to this.
I am a huuge sports fan and i used to love using the bbc sport site because it was easy to navigate and reliable. i could not be more sisappointed when i turned my computer on today.
I thought the old page was one of the best on the internet; the key categories were listed on the left of the page and it made it very easy to find what you wanted. on top of this all the main headlines were in a large box at the top of which you could scroll across to see different headlines or images. visually it was a perfect site.
However, now, the screen is tiny, all articles are in the same small hard to read text, nothing stands out and it just looks dull! what are you thinking?? it doesnt appeal to young people at all, its like taking an ipod off a kid and giving them an old gen blackberry to navigate, a real headache. visually the whole page looks like a big essay, there is too much CRAMMED into one space and you just can't be bothered to search for what before was easy to find. I think bbc have really shot themselves in the foot; the reason i never used the bbc news pages is because they look the same. i hate to say, but i think i will now use sky. PLEASE BRING BACK THE OLD SITE!

GOOD:
I like the new stats with the tables, but most people won't ever find this as it's in tiny small print - 'view full table', on a very cluttered website, making it hard to find anything.

The live text commentaries are always good.

It's great to have video and audio from my local team, Swindon Town, something which is unique to BBC Sport

NOT SO GOOD:
BRANDING: BBC Sport has superb branding on screen (television) however this has not translated onto the new website's top banner. On TV it has beautiful glossy finishes and a mix of black and yellow. On the website it is just a massive ugly block of yellow colour, no gloss, no shine, and the logo is the wrong weight. If you want coherent branding throughout BBC Sport then this really needs improving.

SO MUCH CLUTTER: I'd assumed that this new site would 'de-junk' many of the out of date, useless features of the old site. For example the Football League 2 index page has a Comment and Analysis module. This is fine if BBC Sport were ever to provide Comment and analysis on League 2, but it very rarely does so the articles showing are from last summer! Therefore it just has the effect of cluttering up the page and making it hard to find the good, interesting up to date content. So get rid of it! It's the same with club pages and minority sports, which will be very rarely updated. If it's not going to be updated, get rid. Do it well or not at all.

BBC News is great at being able to find interesting stuff quickly, but with so much clutter on BBC Sport, good interesting stuff is hard to find - let the interesting up to date content breathe, that tiny middle column with the headlines is horrible also. And 'more from BBC Sport' - no one ever looks at this do they? Again could be got rid to make room for the big stories and interesting articles.

BBC Sport seems a case of quantity over quality a lot of the time.

NO MOST POPULAR/SHARED: As this is such a popular feature on BBC News i had presumed this would be added as it is such a useful way of finding the most interesting stuff. Why would you not have this??

One other small improvement would be to have a personalisation module on Football with your own team.

FIXTURES/RESULTS: Fixtures by month rather than individual date, that makes finding fixtures on a partcular day difficult. Results are sorted by competition, you cant sort it by date, so no good for Sat evening looking at the results at a glance. And can the points column on the tables be highlighted or put as the last column, it gets lost.

CONTENT: The articles are often really boring. What BBC News does brilliantly is the correspondent pages, updated daily with whatever big story they're talking about eg. Robert Peston, Nick Robinson. It would be a massive improvement if Sport did the same, and especially around major events. Regular updated articles from the BBC's sports correspondents.

Same comments as everyone else really.

Site design is great.

Colour scheme is awful.

Why dont the videos work on an ipad?

It's really bad. I'm confused as to how anyone with the slightest feeling for design or usability could look at that new creation of yours and think it was a good plan.

The new site looks awful.

The content is displayed chaotically making everything look horribly cluttered and the colour scheme is terrible.

There only positive from the new BBC website debacle is that it has forced me to look at other sites for my news- I think I'll just keep using them until the Beeb gets this fixed.

Ask yourself- would a site designed by Apple look like this?

No! Because it is neither functional nor aesthetically pleasing. A massive fail by whoever the bbc got to create this.

I can not even begin to describe how bad your site is.
Appalling colours, focus on video, hover over buttons.

If ever a site was designed by committee it is this.
Put it back to the old site while you still can

Sorry, but the new sports page looks a chaotic mess and is difficult to navigate - I loved the old layout but this just looks wrong. I have a standard PC & monitor but there are odd boxes sticking out the left of the pages - is that deliberate? And aren't you aware that white on black headings are a strain on the eyes? Everything just seems to be laid out at random.

Awful, awful, awful, too bright, too cluttered and doesn't seem to work! Been trying to get it to show me league one table instead of premier and it's steadfastly refuses to change. Where has the live vide printer gone?

What would be really useful when redesigning a site is to allow users to select between the old and new versions. I suspect if that were allowed on both the Sport Pages and Home Page, most would choose the older versions. I know I would.

Change for improvement is fine. Change for the sake of it is not good. Senior Management at the BBC should wake up and realise that. I suspect this blog will shortly be closed for the same reason as the blog on the new home page was closed - those in charge cannot accept the the criticism.

Cait ORiordan - it was said in the FAQs that "The BBC has summarised the findings of audience research, and published these on the Internet Blog". Well I can't find them anywhere - are they here?
Mouse-over colour change on the toolbar - why, really? Distracting and pointless. The yellow is very, very garish. Too much whitespace to conform to the latest web design 'fashion' rather than usability. The rest I'll reserve judgement on for a few days of use.

Quite frankly this is awful. Good bye BBC Sport, you were once incredible, now you are yellow, like a Frenchman. Hello Sky Sports News.

Too much yellow as other people have said - when you're already using a bright background (white), basic design rules say don't add another bright colour as the background for your headers and navigation. Oh, if you set 16 point fonts in Firefox, the "As it stands" live premier league table doesn't line up (no testing from the BBC with large fonts - just like 99% of incompetent designers).

However, my biggest bug bear is one that the BBC has fallen foul of both with the old and new design - fixed width pages. In these days of hi-res widescreen monitors, to fail to resize the page to fill the whole browser window is appalling (you end up with massive white and yellow space on the left and right of the page!). The BBC isn't the only site out there with fixed width pages, but it's probably one of the highest profile ones...

I am astonished at how worked up people can get about change. Frankly bizarre that people would consider using another site just because the BBC one is a bit more yellow than you're used to. I wouldn't normally comment but wanted to provide some balance.

I think it's very good and easy to navigate. When I first looked in the morning it was a bit dominated by football but that seemed to balance out during the day.

I predict that the fuss will die down, a few Luddites might move but that the usage of the site will justifiably continue to grow now, during the Olympics and beyond.

To me the colour is,less important than the fabulous BBC content!

@Cait: I can well imagine the effort that went into the site redesign. And the 'internal' features you describe (journalists not having to manually post in multiple places) sound like a useful advance. Improvements to interactivity sound good too.

But I'm afraid I agree with the weight of opinion here.

1. The colour scheme is just too strong. The yellow in particular is arresting and distracting.
2. The page IA is far too cluttered. It's an onslaught of visual noise: too much information, too close together, no visual boundaries between elements. It's hard work to read, like those puzzles opticians use (the ones with the multi-coloured dots where you have to look for the pattern).

Here's hoping that some of your incremental improvements address the more fundamental issues in the near term.

A lot of hate here - to be expected when people are faced with change. Learning is not what people want to do when checking their team's progress.

Overall I like it but its a bit too harsh visually, distracting from the content, which should be the emphasis. The news site executes this better.

The color palette is a little harsh. Black is just a very strong color (non-color, I guess) and rarely used in graphic design. Try matching the BBC logo dark grey (on rollover). Too many colors on the text around the page, visited links do not need to be differentiated - most can remember which stories they have read - this isn't a search results page. Not sure if I love the headlines invading the images, that might make image selection tricky...

Other than that it looks like it has a lot more promise for relevant content than the old site. I am interested to see what happens next and don't worry too much about the hate, Cait - I'm sure you expected this reaction initially!

As others have said here, I signed up especially to add my two cents. Now before I begin I should say that my comment is going to be incredibly negative, but probably not for the reasons some of you might think. So here we go...

I'm so completely fed up with people complaining on the internet. I realise the absurdity of saying that, afterall that seems to be solely what the internet is for these days. But, really, some of you people need to grow up. You'll all have to go out and buy new keyboards tomorrow after the amount of tears that must've been shed over the top of them.

It's a website. A website that's different to the one you were used to the other day. Nobody is saying you have to like it, but if you have to make any criticism, would it not be better to be constructive about it instead of throwing your toys out of the pram and spouting something about web design best practices that you just Googled? And if any of you that are doing so are actually professional web designers, then even more shame on you for not being more thoughtful.

Anyway, I think it's looks great. Well done to the Beeb web team on all their hard work. It must be tough to read all the brash knee-jerk negativity, but just keep on doing what you're doing. Looking forward to reading more from the designers on the new site.

Does the yellow vary between monitors? For me it's verging on the painful at home but just about bearable at work.

Ergh. Too much yellow/black. Pages appear cluttered and hectic. One of my favourite, most frequently visited sites has been butchered.

It's an incoherent mess. The designers should hang their heads in shame.

You can imagine the mantra in the meeting room at the BBC whilst discussing the furore over the new Sport website "Ignore them, they will soon give up and just accept it.....Ignore them, they will soon give up and just accept it". I cannot see why the website has to be changed for the 2012 Olympics.....though to be fair the changes to the BBC Sports website are proving almost as unpopluar as the 2012 Olympics anyway!

It's so much better than the homepage update but is no better than the original design. I'd go as far as saying it's actually more difficult to read, the text seems to be all over the place and overlapping images which just looks untidy. There just seems to be too much going on it's hard to focus and lets not get started about the sheer amount of yellow. Why change something that was spot on, easy to navigate and easy to read?

On the whole, it's OK. I guess. The colour scheme is pretty garish but my eyesight isn't great anyway. However I do have a couple of suggestions.

The Formula 1 page looks great with the black background and is quite easy on the eyes. I'd prefer that look to be rolled out to all the other pages.

The way the pictures interrupt the text columns from the left is jarring. I think most people would prefer to read in a straight line. I read the site a lot on a mobile which you can pinch into the text and it will format it all to fit the screen so you can ignore all the other stuff. These random indentations completely break my ability to do that. No other website I use causes this problem.

I wonder whether the sport site would be improved by changing the masthead to use the transparent-dark background instead of black. At least then the contrast would be less harsh, and may even make the yellow more bearable for some.

Also on articles, where there is content (eg. clips, 'did you know') on the left hand side is there any way to ensure the text on the right hand side remains indented until the end of that paragraph. It can be rather disruptive on the eye when it suddenly jumps back to the left for a few words. This is one advantage of the News site layout where the 'small column' is on the right instead of the left. Perhaps not the best example of this can be seen on https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/football/16714048

Yellow bar's ok. Points up the sections without being too bold on the eye.

PLEASE kill the bright yellow. Makes the site totally unusable.

where i applaud the BBC for revamping the website, and bringing it into the modern age to coincide with the London Olympics and such, i do feel that there are a few ... how can i put this, faux pas' on the website which could either have been properly thought about, or in the future redesigned and improved.

1/ The excessive use of the bright yellow - hurts the eyes! too ... bright!

2/ The mish mash of information dictated on the site - for me, i think there needs to be borders around sections so you know what you are looking at, the headlines in the football section look like they have either just be been placed on to fill space, becuase it was rushed or looks like an error where you using an incompatible website or something


i think they are the main issues

apart from that, i love the match reports in the football, the amount of information and the way the images are cut into the report are cool!

What an abysmal, incoherent excuse for a website. There's nothing to guide the eye through the jumble so it's difficult to find what you want, add to that incomprehensible choice of colour. So that's the Homepage wrecked, Sport wrecked so I fear News must be the next in line.

I suspect that no matter how many of us post our disapproval here, the result will be the same as that seen on the Home Page, i.e. those who have made the changes will take absolutely no notice and just carry on with their original plans. To do anything else would be an admission that they've got it wrong, and that would never do.

I much prefer the new site, but I do question the logic behind doing big redesigns. Anytime a popular site does a complete redesign they seem to be deluged with sensationlist comments from disgruntled users who are apparently "never going to use the site again" or "can't believe you didn't put a big green box on the left hand side". Would it not be easier to introduce UI improvements and taxonomy changes incrementaly, and independently from branding changes?

I actually think that Facebook are quite good at incremental UI changes. If you compare their UI from a few years ago to how it is now, it's almost unrecognisable, but I can never recall an occasion when they seemed to roll out a complete redesign.

Dear BBC, check out your football pages, some joker's replaced them with the most horrendous, abusive, brand led design I've ever seen.

What are your brand and design team thinking? This is not like the BBC to put brand before user. Please sort it out as I want the content but I can't cope with the headaches and visual pain the new site is giving me.

Off to UEFA.com and Sky for footie news where they put content and users first.

Awful. Truly awful. At least give us the option to revert to the old format and save us from the glare.

It looks a mess - way too busy, poor nagivation, slow load times and nasty colour choices.

It is a real shame , as the BBC Sport site has always been the No.1, but even the excellent content cannot compensate for the dire browsing experience of the new look site.

If it aint broke...

"When it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change".

I'm off for a lie down now as my eyes have exploded. Who let the work experience intern loose with the "My First Web Site" Kit again ? Not content with ruining the Homepage and the Radio page (despite universal criticism during beta testing), we now have the Sports Pages destroyed. Fine if you have an iPad, are high on caffeine and E-Numbers and are interested only in football, but is there a hidden agenda here ?

Is the BBC deliberately trying to drive down the hits in order to justify further cutting the web budget ? Less hits, well, clearly, people aren't using the BBC so we can't justify investment.......

Next on the list will be the News Pages and that really will sound the death-knell for the BBC's Internet Presence.

It is completely untrue that the recent increase in Aurorae has been caused by the disruption in the earth's geomagnetic field caused by Lord Reith revolving at supercritical speeds in his grave.

thanks, we have see what clare stocks has to say but it doesnt respond to the real concerns. we dont want to know why you did something, you have already done it. we dont wnat to read the lead designers justification for the changes. in real world use those justifications dont stand up to scrutiny im afraid.we want to know what you are going to do about the huge negative response to the sites redesign. what are you actually going to do to ally these concerns?


"Story pages - supplementary content ‘set left’ in pages.
Our lead designer writes:
“The layout is designed to allow related content to flow with the story and to allow flexibility to contain the full breadth of modules available on our international site.”
There are also some archive pages where top images and video appear slightly set left and we are working to improve the appearance of those more recent archive stories which still receive significant traffic. "

the layout may be designed to do that but it doesnt do that does it???? the new layout makes it harder to read articles because its in 2 different fonts and is interrupted by snippets.

"Global navigation - core sports and more sports dropdown
This has divided opinion with some people saying they like the fact they can now get to all sports from any section. We think this is an improvement on the previous navigation and means it is easier to jump from sport to sport, and moving it to the top of the page means we can showcase more content across a wider main page."

its not an improvement on the left hand side bar on the previous site, it makes it harder to find what you want. put the left hand side bar on all pages- job done.

"3. Video not working on tablets/smart phones;-
Some of you have pointed out video is available on these devices for other BBC sites. We are working very hard to make BBC Sport video work on these devices but it is complicated by the rights restrictions which apply to most of our media. The main issue is we need to ensure encryption on those devices to ensure we can geographically protect those streams (as sports rights are usually sold by territory). We are committed to making this work for users of recent Android and iOS handsets, in time for this year’s Olympic Games."

it works fine on android. you havent worked out how to implement HTML5 have you. you need to get this working before the Olympics or your going to look amateur im afraid.

-i think you have lost the idea of what a headline is. headlines are the lead stories of the day/week, as such they should be at the top of the page( the clue is in the name- head=top) not scattered around the page.

- the bb homepage uses horizontal panels to navigate, why have you not continued this theme and gone with a larger vertical page style? it doesnt fit in with the rest of the site and makes looking for content that much harder.
- the audio/video box is wasted where it is. once you have seen what youw ant from this box it just gets in the way. this space should be used to actual headlines.

please start taking people concerns on board, coming back with explanations about what you have done isnt good enough. as licence fee payers we are the users of the site and we pay for it. we demand a decent response.

@76 Robert Clarke- i guess you havent had facebooks timeline enforced on you yet eh? eg a complete UI redesign that the majority of users arent happy with. most people have no problem with UI redesigns where there is a need or a benefit to that redesign. however what the designers have done here is actually make the UI worse and the content harder to find and in the process completely going against the 2 basics of website design- ease of use and ability to find content quickly. its a backwards step on both counts and someone needs to stand up and apologise ASAP because there are a lot of unhappy and upset users who have seen a well loved and cherished site destroyed.

I don't normally get involved with Web Forums, but I feel so disappointed with the changes to the BBC Sports Web-pages that I have to make a comment. The 'old' layout was so clear and easy to follow, but the new layout is absolutely appalling. The BBC often seems intent on self-destruction, by changing the format of tried-and-tested programmes and forcing people to switch off and now you seem intent on doing the same with your web-pages. If the BBC is short of money, as we keep hearing, why waste money on changing a perfectly good product? Please, please, please revert to the old web layout and let common sense prevail.

have a look at the majority of the mock ups pictured at the top of this page- the vast majority show the site as a thin line with wasted white borders either side. i cannot beleive that at this stage someone didnt stop to think that that wasnt a good idea!!

did you just show these paper mock ups to the survey beta testing group? because if you did no wonder the response was good. what a website looks like on paper and what it looks like on screen are entirely different. who designs a website with paper mockups anyway!! what an archaic useless practice not to mention a complete waste of resources.

the silence is deafening. Cait O'Riordan- please come on here and respond to your users about this shambles!! TODAY!!

there are two big problems.
1 - the yellow is overwhelming, and the shade of yellow gives me a headache, it's way too bright.
2 - putting the clickable news items in the middle of the page is to me incomprehensible. i'm a software developer, and this U/I is badly designed. news items should be on the left with the big story in the middle. our brains naturally look to the left or right, not the middle, it is very difficult to understand.

lets hope this lack of response is because the team behind this are in meetings trying to figure out how to save face and not look like the complete amateurs they really are.

creative review have critiqued the site, i suggest the design team read this ASAP and take on board what it says:

https://www.creativereview.co.uk/cr-blog/2012/february/bbc-unveils-new-sport-website

'@Martin Rogers (55); we showed the site to nearly 2,000 people prior to the launch and 80% described the site as appealing on first look with users citing the range of content and sports available, the modern look and feel and the clear layout as things they liked. In the near future we will be posting a new blog post on the considerable amount of user research we carried out to help us build the new website.'

Well I for one will be fascinated to see who you asked and what, as well as in what format, they were shown. I find it really hard to believe that 4 out of 5 people, when confronted with the dog's breakfast that is the sport website now, actually liked what they saw

Re Football; the pages themselves are way too busy, and as other people have mentioned there is no flow to the information. imo the 'more headlines' should be on the left, there should be section breaks (headers and footers) to separate sections on the page. it's too much of a jumble of information that to our brains looks equally important. you need to make them think somethings are more important, so our eyes are drawn to them. and finally are you using fixed width pages? it's 2012, i don't need all the white (grey) space on either side, what a waste of space. use it to spread out the information more sensibly.

@90 pompey_fritter- they are using fixed width pages, see the paper mockups at the top of the page.

"we showed the site to nearly 2,000 people prior to the launch and 80% described the site as appealing on first look "

translation= we showed the site in paper mockup form to about 1700 people and they said they liked the look of it.

showing the site to people and them actually using the site are entirely different things. WE ARE STILL WAITING FOR A RESPONSE AND WE ARENT GOING AWAY!!

The football page is horrible. Too yellow, too busy and less useable than before.

You have to scroll down now to access the league you want which is desing flaw. Sort it out or lose traffic.

@93: "You have to scroll down now to access the league you want which is desing flaw."
No you don't, at the top of the page in the yellow sub-menu on the right is a link entitled 'Leagues & Competitions'. Simply click it and you'll be able to select your league from the drop-down menu.

Oh yeah, thanks @93.

Still hurts my eyes and not user friendly.

ok there are now nearly 800 comments on ben gallops blog page, the overwhelming majority of them are negative comments from disgruntled users, there is a huge amount of feedback you have received already. we have been promised some response from Cait, Ben or Claire and we havent had one that actually addresses the users concerns. this is not good enough, simply not good enough. you cant bury your heads in the sand and think this is all going to go away, it isnt. start communicating with your users and start responding to the huge amount of complaints.

this redesign has been universally panned by users, web designers, web developers and those in the creative industries. when are you going to do something about it!!!

BBC's Ben Gallop describes this redesign as a "significant piece of work" and that the "changes are in response to audience feedback and research".

Clearly, both in my opinion and that of those posting here (not to mention the unanimous opinion of others) the new website is clearly too YELLOW and the overall design and poor layout has been very badly received.

This change was unwelcome and unwanted and should be recorded as a short lived trial.

If public desire matters (those who ultimately have paid for these changes) then a swift return to the previous design will be inevitable.

Yes, the previous design may have welcomed "tweaking" however was a well used and received website being both professional in appearance and usability and of an appropriate standing for the BBC.

In times of cutbacks those who now "maintain" this new look may find themselves redundant due to lack of use as users (as evident from comments) desert BBC and move elsewhere.

Note to BBC - IF IT AIN'T BROKE DON'T FIX IT !

It's all a bit too contrasty. Needs some subtlety, some greys, some tints. Smaller text here and there. Too many different sizes of regular (not bold) text on white or yellow all competing with each other. The blue could be a tad greyer. Why is that blue there anyway? Yellow boxes around 'play' icons too big. Indents on the 'Other Sports' sub-heads are out. Otherwise it's ok.

Having had the BBC Sport page as the first tab of my home pages since tabbed browsing was available I have now had to delete it. My PC is on 24/7 and IE is always open but since your new page was released I have had three BSOD's and multiple system freezes that just didn't happen before. I thought initially it was down to an IE update but after removing that the problem continued, the only other change on the system was the content of tab 1, the new BBC Sport page. Having closed that tab down my system has been rock solid again! Sorry guys but its over to Sky Sports now for my sports feed. Don't know what you have done to it but it smacks of a lack of testing on IE9. (there is also way too much yellow in it!)

Clunky, amateur and generally unprofessional. There are some really good design firms in the UK, any reason why you didn't get some input - assuming an in-house team did this, because I can't see any organisation that has to be competitive in the web design marketplace getting away with this.