Tuesday, March 18, 2008

How It Should Be: The Website

I'll start the What Should Be series with "The Website". Maybe it sounds like a strange place to start, but with a series like BB, the website is almost more important than the TV episodes. The series runs 24 hours a day, and the website provides a real-time portal to the latest information, so it has to be usable.

A lot of people have seen the leaked pictures of the website in development. What we see there is a fairly chunky website-- everything looks kind of big. Having built a lot of financial/banking-style websites myself, I am more used to a site that crams a lot into a small space. As screen resolution gets better, this is not as important though. The site definitely looks clean. The site for the last few years has been dark and drab, with terrible colour choices of greys mixed with a rainbow of menu options-- purple, red, yellow, orange. The new blue and white site is very refreshing.

We can also see, even from the development site, that one of their primary focuses is to find space for huge advertisements before they find a space for content. I understand that advertising revenue is important to the producers. Our BB series are structured around product placements. But the stand-in ads on the development site take up way too much screen space. A third of the page width is taken up by KFC ads. Hopefully these eyesores will be kept to a minimum so they don't take away from the site's usability.

The other thing that needs to be considered is a tie between the look and feel of the site, and the look and feel of the series. BB03 probably did this best with the little "sprite" characters, as they were used around the website and in the titles and logos of the series. BB05-07 tried to match the look of the show by making elements of the site resemble the "boxes" used in the logo and titles, but it didn't pay off. This year's site needs to use elements of what we see on TV to tie the two together.

As for content, I am hoping to see better housemate profiles. I don't want to know what their astrological profile says. I want to know more about the person's outside (and inside) life. The profile never has information like occupation, what their family life is like (are their parents together, separated, do they have siblings, how old, what are ther names, step-siblings?, do they have a husband/wife/partner/kids of their own?-- all important things to know as we watch the series). The diary entries were good and frequent last year, and hopefully this year's site keeps that up. The amount of free content doesn't bother me so much because I will pay for premium content no matter what. Hopefully for casual users' sake, and the general interest in the series by new viewers, plenty of free content is provided, just to keep interest up. I'll cover premium content in a later post.