3 ideas to steal from bbc.co.uk/home/beta/, and 6 ideas to make it better; 15 Web principles from the BBC

To steal from BBC beta home:

1. Giving control to the customers: Make the display of your news site customizable. Make sections draggable-droppable, expandable/hideable. Especially cool: Use “+” and “-” to add or remove a headline from the list. Some folks already do this using your RSS feeds, but this is a way to serve people uninterested in Netvibes, iGoogle or any other service that pulls information to one location to replace the eventually disappearing activity of chasing information in many locations.
2. Evolve your story tips: The 3 headlines with pics that change upon mouse-over are an efficient, visual way to get me inside the site.
3. Visual: Use subtle variations in background color to indicate shifts in topic areas.

To improve BBC beta home:

1. Add “most read,” “most e-mailed” and “most linked-to” blocks.
2. Make the section blocks draggable from the Web browser to my desktop, creating an instant niche news widget that requires no browser launch.
3. Kill the Flash clock, though it may entertain some customers. It’s unnecessary.
4. Don’t go halfway. Make every component customizable. Some pieces, such as the directory above the footer, the header area, and the big pic, fail to offer tweakability.
5. Work on the article detail level before you work on the home page. That’s where search traffic goes (and roughly 30% of all traffic?). Yes, those readers are less loyal customers, but that also means they have the most untapped potential for additional interaction with your site.
6. Prepare for the day when your home page no longer matters (followed by sections, followed by article detail level). Journalists, employed collectively or individually, are becoming information wire services for content aggregators and editors outside and inside the newsroom.

Reporters, your city editor is going to be one of many customers in the future.
Via UX Mag

Update

Peek at the BBC’s 15 Web prinicples (check out slides 18, 22, 41 and 48):

Via annahavana.blogspot.com

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