BBC 15 Web Principles

Tom Loosemore, the head of the BBC’s Web 2.0 project, talked at a conference that I gave a gave a demo of ICT Guides at yesterday (called the JISC Conference) on the BBCs web initiative. He has developed a set of good practice principles for the BBC’s Web 2.0 initiatives, which respects the web as a medium in its own right and not something to be civilised by ‘old media’.

Now if we could only get the academic community to stop imposing print publishing ‘ontologies’ on the Web and respect it as a medium in its own right!

We developed these as part of the BBC2.0 project. I’ve been meaning to publish them for a while since they were signed off by the BBC board. They’re perpetually draft.

1. Build web products that meet audience needs: anticipate needs not yet fully articulated by audiences, then meet them with products that set new standards. (nicked from Google) 2. The very best websites do one thing really, really well: do less, but execute perfectly. (again, nicked from Google, with a tip of the hat to Jason Fried)

3. Do not attempt to do everything yourselves: link to other high-quality sites instead. Your users will thank you. Use other people’s content and tools to enhance your site, and vicversasa.

4. Fall forward, fast: make many small bets, iterate wildly, back successes, kill failures, fast.

5. Treat the entire web as a creative canvas: don’t restrict your creativity to your own site.

6. The web is a conversation. Join in: Adopt a relaxed, conversational tone. Admit your mistakes.

7. Any website is only as good as its worst page: Ensure best practice editorial processes are adopted and adhered to.

8. Make sure all your content can be linked to, forever.

9. Remember your granny won’t ever use Second Life: She may come online soon, with very different needs from early-adopters.

10. Maximise routes to content: Develop as many aggregations of content about people, places, topics, channels, networks & time as possible. Optimise your site to rank high in Google.

11. Consistent design and navigation needn’t mean one-size-fits-all: Users should always know they’re on one of your websites, even if they all look very different. Most importantly of all, they know they won’t ever get lost.

12. Accessibility is not an optional extra: Sites designed that way from the ground up work better for all users

13. Let people paste your content on the walls of their virtual homes: Encourage users to take nuggets of content away with them, with links back to your site

14. Link to discussions on the web, don’t host them: Only host web-based discussions where there is a clear rationale

15. Personalisation should be unobtrusive, elegant and transparent: After all, it’s your users’ data. Best respect it (link to ToLoosemoreses blog)

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Comments

3 responses to “BBC 15 Web Principles”

  1. Andrew Garton Avatar

    again, 5 minutes ahead and yet the rest want u to be several years behind. wrote an article in the early 90s about the web being a medium of itself and independent of others. takes the BBC to make it real. good on them!

  2. craig Avatar

    yes but the BBC broadcasts to about 20 Million people. This is what the ‘common man’ looks like…ie. the very defination of ‘common’ is magnitude.

    so if you were doing something 20 years ago and no one understood you, and now they do, then this is good. we are doing things here are King’s that may become ‘common’ in a few years.

  3. Penguin Avatar

    Allelluia for number 12. Thought it was a really good keynote, though one of my colleagues was tramatised at the thought of using Flossie’s hide for the charter!

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