BBC News website

Yup must admit, much prefer the old site, it was more logical with menu's down the left for relevant stories.

Didn't realise there was such a backlash over it!!

I don't like it. The disorganisation and all the different font sizes make it look cluttered, no matter what they wibble about "white space". Categories at the top makes navigation awkward (getting sick of scrolling) and ugh.

Admittedly at least some of this is going to be because I've enjoyed using the old version of the site for so many years, it was familiar. Learning my way around new things can be fun, true, but the BBC news goes with the First Cup Of Tea, at that point in the day I don't want to be trying to get my head around unfamiliar layouts, I just want to see what's going on in the world.

Biggest thing for me is the removal of the text-only part of the site. When I was looking at the news on my phone, that would load in under five seconds. It WORKED. Why take it away? I hate viewing video on my phone, I don't want to see it and I certainly don't want to twiddle my thumbs for a minute or more while it tries to load. I bet people with limited mobile data connections are annoyed too. I saw something about a mobile app but I haven't got round to playing with that yet.

I also hear that a lot of screen-reader users are upset at the removal of the text-only site - apparently the new site is not WCAG 2.0 compliant, although previous versions were. It's not like the BBC News site was designed by one of the cameramen who had some spare time fiddling about with Wordpress and asking his pals on a SME business forum "what do you think of my website?" It would have been put together by a team of well-paid professionals who should have known about the industry standards it had to meet. Why did they not do their jobs properly? Were they too stupid to know how to implement access or did they just feel that blind people didn't need to read the news?

Ironically, to find out why the site is no longer accessible to screen readers and people with certain visual or cognitive-processing impairments, you have to be able to navigate through the site to the FAQ. Halfway through that, they say that at some unspecified point "later this year" they are "expecting to roll out a suite of accessibility tools". No deadline, no suggestion of what should be done in the meantime, no explanation or apology for the delay. It's one of those slow handclap moments.

Oh dear. Eleven minutes past nine on a Saturday of all days and I'm already ranting. I should probably go back to bed.

BBC World, when viewed outside the UK, is on the right track, but not there yet.

The drudgereport.com format is good for the user, but not the best business model.

Need more international content.