Given existing pages on the site use a similar design, it looks fairly obvious this is the way they're going to go - the preview idea is something they've done more often and is a good idea to gauge what people like/don't like.
The clock is just an odd feature - quickly dropped in the early days of BBC News Online and given the fact every desktop screen has a clock, a bit pointless!
The homepage does need to lose that awful blue design and be brought kicking and screaming into the Web 2.0 era.
There
is
a clock there... bizarre, but a nice surprise.
I also notice that they're giving up with the awful bbc.co.uk navigation banner at the top, and will actually be putting the [B] [B] [C] logo on it, instead.
I do think that the headings for each box are
far
too big and chunky. As I'm now once again stuck behind a 1024*768 display, I can't see below the News box, or the main 'what's on' box. It's really irritating.
The 'TV' box also has its problems - as the links for each channel's listings are directly beside the listings, it makes it look like
The One Show
will be on BBC2 at 7:00pm. And surely they know that the correct capitalisation is BBC One, BBC Two, BBC Three etc, not BBC ONE, BBC TWO, BBC THREE etc.
I like the design, and the way you can move stuff about.
Certainly different from the existing design. It's nice how the home page can be customised by adding, removing, and moving the various sections about. Also when you click on one of the tabs below the 'home page feature' the colour scheme changes to match the selected colour tab. The concept seems familiar to a few ideas which appeared in the competition.
Overall I think I like the new design though perhaps needs some refining. It has a reasonable balance of providing generic content whilst allow quite a bit of customisation for users. I like the analogue style clock, it looks better than a 'digital' clock. The BBC logo seems a tad too big and distracting on the eye.
