A Few Changes to the Music Website

If you've found your way to this blog post via the BBC Music homepage, you'll already have noticed a couple of changes to the design of the site as of late last week. We've significantly revised the design and functionality of various parts of the homepage in particular. The main content promotion area at the top of the page, the scrolling ribbon of artists played on the BBC and the album reviews box have all been redesigned both to make it easier to move around all the promoted content, and to provide more information about the range of content on offer. We test our websites regularly, and in the session that led to these changes we found that users, in particular those with disabilities, found some of our old design and functionality hard to understand and use, so we really hope these changes will help. We'd love to hear your views, whether or not you agree.

Elsewhere, I'm delighted to say that audio has returned to our album reviews (more loyal users will remember that we used to host audio clips in RealMedia until our relaunch earlier this year). The audio has actually been there for a couple of weeks, but we're especially proud of our new listen button which appeared with the recent set of changes as part of our review tracklists. Here's just one example of a fully audible review. We're surprised there aren't more online reviews offering audio, but happy to be out on this particular limb.

In other improvements to our album reviews offering, we've also reintroduced another late lamented feature in the form of "Like This? Try These..." links from some of our reviews - like this one. And with recommendations from BBC brands an increasingly key part of our approach to reviewing albums, we've started to aggregate these recommendations in pages like this. We've also made a page where you can see all our recommendations together.

Finally, we've tweaked the "Played By" section of our artist pages so that we're no longer displaying histogram-style bars next to programmes that have recently played a given artist. Since we're not actually displaying numbers of plays here (for good but complicated reasons), we thought the bars weren't adding much to the page and decided to tidy them up. For anyone who actually wants to see the raw numbers, they're still there in machine-readable feeds such as xml & rss.

All feedback welcome.