More in this post from Steve Herman, editor of the BBC news website, at The Editors blog. But in the meantime, the new BBC home page is live. The Beeb offers a tour; you can customize this new home page.
I'll go into more detail about the changes once you’re able to see them for yourselves, but the new look will include wider pages, bigger images, a new programmes area on the front page and a new pan-BBC masthead.
Overall the idea is to make the whole site even easier to use, creating more room for the content to be easily seen and scanned.
Along with this, as I mentioned previously, we’ve been gradually rolling out a new system for showing video and audio – embedding it within our story pages (here’s an example) so it’s quicker and simpler to access. It’s confined to just some stories for now, and we’ve been assessing how it’s doing.
Early signs suggest that on those stories where we’ve embedded the video in a story, as opposed to providing the link to a pop-up player as we've done up to now, the video gets about ten times more usage than before. So it looks like it’s working well so far… More soon on the rest of the changes.