BBCi Rebrand Goes Satellite

Published on 22 March 2005 in , , , , ,

It’s pretty hard to celebrate something when at the same time all is doom and gloom thanks to redundancies, budget cuts and so on. So internally, the relaunch of BBCi on satellite probably wasn’t on the cusp of many peoples minds. But relaunch we did, and I got to write another email to tell everyone how wonderful they are.

The new look follows the relaunch a fortnight ago on Telewest and looks pretty similar – abliet with a different font and some page numbers – hence why I can’t be bothered to bung up some screengrabs right now.

When Telewest went up, I wrote about how the new look is cleaner and clearer. Nowhere is that more apparent than on the satellite version. The old satellite service – launched back in June 2003 – was perhaps the most bizarre looking service out of the three platforms.

Some items in the menu had square icons. Some had square icons that had an ‘i’ in them. Some were indented. Some were above a big text link marked ‘INTERACTIVE PROGRAMMES’. Some were below. Some were in uppercase. Some were in mixed case…

Funnily enough there was some logic to all this, but comparing the new look (sans-indents, sans-icons, sans-‘INTERACTIVE PROGRAMMES’ link) to the old, there’s no comparison. It just looks so much cleaner, so much nicer, so much friendlier.

That’s the key point in a way. It doesn’t look as daunting when you look at it for the first time. It’s relatively simple and clear to see what’s going on.

With any homepage the standard technique is to put too much on it – because there’s so much you want to promote. The problem is that, unless you’re really lucky, you can make it too cluttered, too daunting. The first time user takes one look, feels scared and wanders off to Ceefax again. The obvious hope with the new version, is that that won’t happen as much and that instead of going back to Ceefax, they’ll stick with us and have a look around.

Now it’s up and all went reasonably smoothly, I can relax for a bit in the knowledge that we’re almost there. I say relax for a bit cos next stop is Freeview which is waiting in the wings for its moment of glory…

No peace for the wicked eh?

Oh and incidentally, hello everyone at work who was asking five minutes after it had gone live, whether I’d blogged about it yet. Sorry, but I ain’t that quick – but I think posting this only nine hours after the event ain’t a bad record!