Yoz Graeme has started a website [update: no longer online] allowing people to document the little niggles that you might have with the mighty BBC website.
The idea, which I think is a good one, originated from his rant about BBC website addresses being lowercase despite sites like iCan having particular capitilizations in the branding.
This, and Neuro Me’s post on the problems with having to read out website addresses on radio bring me to an idea I had to solve this problem, which I posted to the BBC’s intranet site whilst working there.
Instead of reading out ‘bee bee see dot ko dot yoo kay forward slash news’ every time, why not assume people know the URL and allow presenters to read out ‘the bee bee see website slash news’? If you built this up as a standard thing, the ‘slash news’ (or whatever) could become a brand unto itself and help build awareness of the BBC’s wide and varied site.
The suggestion didn’t do down well though, with BBC staffers claiming that the majority of viewers didn’t even know so much as how to type URLs into the address bar – with many users coming to the website via a search engine or portal. Even more confusingly, Martin reports that a substantial amount of users try putting website addresses into the BBCi Search box.
Maybe an idea for the future though eh?
Fabian De Rango said:
BBC Site doesnt work.