Writing a (since deleted) paragraph for my discussion about commercial radio, I visited the BBC Radio homepage to discover it had been redesigned. And, later, I note Tristan blogging about it. [As a hello to non-UK audiences - I'm talking about the UK version of that page. You can toggle it with the options in the blue bar at the top of the page.]

Tristan’s excited about it: and with reason. It looks lovely. I especially like the ‘ways to listen’ navbar underneath the main station - a really graphic way of demonstrating how accessible radio is these days.

I’m not sure about the roll-over stuff, though. It’s anything but accessible: I regularly over-shoot with my mouse, for example, which means if I want to listen to BBC7, it’s too easy for me to find myself listening to BBC Radio 2 or BBC Radio 3 by accident. Particularly with the trackpad on this oh-so-slow iBook G4, I don’t have very good mouse control; and I do worry about others with similar conditions.

I’m also quite glad I’m not an Interactive Editor for one of the networks: because this redesigned website could easily make their life harder. Virgin Radio’s most popular audience path is “Home page > Listen Now page > Radio Player”; which allows us to sensibly promote our website content to our audience. This new redesigned homepage offers the chance to listen (and thus bypass the website); to see the schedule (and thus bypass the website front page); and three deep-links into the content (thus bypassing the front page).

All in all, I hope that the Interactive Editors are clear about what this new front page could mean to them.

As an aside, the BBC Audio & Music Interactive section has been busy the past week: with Chris Kimber announcing they’ll give weekly unique users instead of monthly. This is odd; comScore and Neilsen both give monthly unique users only, and the web community understand monthly figures so much, I even quote monthly RAJAR figures instead of weekly.

I guess that the BBC, unencumbered by any advertising-based revenue, are quoting weekly figures so that the comparison with weekly RAJAR figures is easier. Might be interesting, then, to do the maths: for radio stations with comparable demographics: BBC Radio 2 has a 13,269 weekly RAJAR reach, but only 400,302 weekly unique users - that means 3.3% of their weekly audience visits their website. Virgin Radio had 2,470,000 weekly RAJAR reach, and an average of 141,588 weekly unique users in January: which says that 5.7% of our weekly audience visits our website.

Interesting.

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