Ordinary Gweilo

The BBC recently upgraded its website.  This is “upgraded” in the sense of making it flashier and brighter and generally less useful.

It also has adverts, which I suppose we can’t complain about because the funding comes from people in the UK who pay for a TV licence (i.e. almost everyone), and those of us in the rest of the world are freeloaders.

Another annoyance is that there is lots of video (on the sports pages at least), which is not available to non-UK residents.  The puzzling part about this is that firstly they ask you to choose a UK or international version, and they also check your IP address, so why not just hide the content you can’t watch?

It’s the design that really annoys me.  More on the sports page than for news, presumably because they are trying to provide coverage for several different sports, and in the summer there are various major events (Euro 2008, Wimbledon, Tour de France, Open Golf, and of course the Olympics).  Unfortunately it all gets so cluttered, and I can never find the information I want.

You can see an archived copy of the old version here.