Since I posted at the end of the first week of the Games, Team GB have broken records of their own, winning the most medals of any British Olympics team since 1908. The once-in-a-lifetime success of our athletes has driven equally incredible engagement from audiences with our Olympics coverage.

With London 2012 at an end, after a spectacular Closing Ceremony last night, I'd like to take this opportunity to tell the story of how the BBC's audiences enjoyed the first truly digital Olympics.

The Olympics in its entirety

Today's sport I never thought I'd watch, shooting. https://bbcstreaming.pages.dev/sport/olympics/2012/live-video/p00w2zwp

- Daniel Thirsk @thirskazoid, 7:12 AM - 2 Aug 12, Twitter

The BBC's promise was to deliver coverage of every sport from every venue, and we certainly achieved this with our digital coverage: from the blue ribbon events like the 100m final all the way to the first taekwondo heats, the multi-faceted entirety of the Olympics was available to watch throughout the day across online and Red Button.

Overall, this comprehensive coverage drove very large amounts of traffic to the Sport website and to Red Button channels.

Daily Reach and Cumulative Total (millions)
BBC Red Button - BARB reach (people aged 4+), with threshold "watched 15 consecutive minutes or more" - in line with BBC TV channel standard metric. Cookie churn means the BBC Online figures will include some unavoidable duplication over this period.

BBC Sport Online's most requested live video stream was of the Tennis Singles Finals, where Andy Murray and Serena Williams were victorious. You can see the rest of the top ten below:

Audiences quickly grew accustomed to being able to switch between up to 24 streams. In between the peaks of Team GB medal moments, our data clearly shows people moving across streams to check out a whole host of different events. For example, around 6pm on Saturday 4th, audiences finished watching GB Gold in Women's Team Pursuit Cycling on stream 7 to take a look at the end of Brazil v Honduras in the football on stream 6, before switching back to stream 7 as the cycling action kicked off again.

And while team GB's medal moments drove huge traffic, at the same time less flagship events were getting attention on other streams: at lunchtime on Monday 30th, while a lot of people were watching swimming on stream 1, more people were concurrently watching weightlifting on stream 12.

Below is a snapshot of the action across a select six Red Button streams on Wednesday 1st August, the day Bradley Wiggins won his record-breaking Gold.

Number of people watching individual streams (millions, BARB, 4+), stacked totals, for six streams with highest peaks on Wednesday 1st Aug.

We wanted to offer the whole breadth of the Games to audiences.

It's been hugely gratifying to see from our data that they embraced our comprehensive coverage: we saw over 106 million requests for BBC Olympic video content across all online platforms

The Olympics wherever and whenever you want it

I've now sampled all of BBC's Olympic coverage BBC1, BBC2, BBC3, BBC1HD, BBCHD, Red Button, Website, App and Radio 5live...

- Kevin Ormiston @lacksorginality, 11:47 AM - 9 Aug 12, Twitter

Offering everything isn't enough in the age of multiple devices: our further ambition was to ensure audiences could access our coverage wherever they were, and whenever they wanted it. For a lot of our audience, that place was, of course, on television: overall our Olympics TV coverage (TV channels and Red Button streams) reached 51.9m people.

As I've previously observed, this has really been the multi-platform Games, where audiences have consumed our content across PC, mobile, tablet and connected TV at different times of the day.

Our data below splits out the four screens across 24 hours, to reveal some key insights:

PC usage maxes out during the week at lunchtime and during mid-afternoon peak Team GB moments

Mobile takes over around 6pm as people leave the office but still want to keep up to date with the latest action

Tablet usage reaches a peak at around 9pm: people using them as a second screen experience as they watch the Games on their TVs, and also as they continue to watch in bed

Usage by hour across the day by device - for 28 July to 9 Aug

Millions of unique browsers daily, stacked, by device type

Consumption of video content on mobile has been perhaps the key takeaway from the two weeks: we saw 12 million requests for video on mobile across the whole of the Games.

We've had 9.2 million browsers to our mobile site and Olympics app over the course of the Games (and over 2.3 million browsers on tablet). While PC and tablet usage has generally peaked and dipped at different times of the day, mobile consumption has increased steadily from the morning to a plateau in the early afternoon, before dipping away in conjunction with TV viewing in the evening. It's obvious: people have their mobiles with them 24/7, and have been using our app and mobile site to keep up to date with the action wherever they are.

The Olympics on your terms

@arealthomastse Too late, he stole the Gold medal. Skip to Chapter 5, Gold Medal point for the over the top reaction. https://bbcstreaming.pages.dev/sport/olympics/2012/live-video/p00w3151

- Aaron Chai @aaron_chai, 10:18 AM - 5 Aug 12, Twitter

With so much content available across multiple devices, our final challenge was to ensure that audiences could find the things they wanted to watch. Our aim was to put audiences in control of their Olympics experience, transforming the way they could navigate through the huge breadth of coverage using the extra features of the interactive video player.

The chapter marking feature, enabling audiences to go back to key event moments instantly, received an average 1.5 million clicks per day. The chapter marker for Bolt's 100m Final win was clicked on more than 13,000 times.

Looking to the future

We invested in delivering the first truly digital Olympics to ensure that our audience had a fantastic experience during the two weeks of the games.

But we also wanted to ensure that the BBC was in the best position to continue to deliver great experiences for years to come. The infrastructure and video delivery systems we have put in for the games will be used for future coverage for both BBC Sport and the rest of the BBC. And all our Olympics video content will be able to watch online on the BBC Sport website until January 13th.

We also hope to leave a lasting legacy in terms of audiences to BBC online. Over the course of the Olympics we attracted huge numbers of new users to our BBC Sport interactive services and we hope that having enjoyed our digital video coverage they will be back for other events the BBC cover in the future.

The digital development teams in London and Salford as well as our commercial partners have worked incredibly hard for months to ensure that we delivered what we set out to do for 2012. Our editorial colleagues have worked around the clock delivering the video and text coverage that our audience loves. I am so glad all that work has paid off with massive audiences enjoying the games across a multitude of devices. The feedback via email, social networks and on the blogs has been genuinely overwhelming.

But no one has worked harder than the athletes in the Olympic venues. Without them rowing faster, pedalling harder, running quicker and boxing better than their competitors, Team GB wouldn't have delivered so many gold medals. And it is those gold medals that people have come to our digital coverage to watch in their millions.

Cait O'Riordan is Head of Product, BBC Sport and London 2012

Related:

• BBC Press Release: BBC Sport breaks online records with first truly digital Olympics

In the build-up to the start of London 2012, my colleagues and I talked about it as the first truly digital Olympics.

Now that we're well into the Games, it's thrilling to see that concept become reality, as huge numbers of people watch and interact with events online at the BBC Sport website, on mobile and tablet, and on connected TV. We're breaking digital audiences records every day.

At the end of last week, I talked about the trends in multi-platform viewing behaviour that we're observing as this mass of data flows in. Today I want to explain a bit more about how our interactive coverage gets from the event itself to the device at your fingertips, wherever it is around the country that you are watching.

It's a fascinating process that begins with a camera capturing the action, and finishes with a complex mix of video and data brought together on your device.

The image above illustrates what happens in between, in the background, as audiences watch the final of the Women's Individual Cycling Sprint this afternoon.

The trip from the velodrome to your device is really two parallel processes, which we bring together at the end to deliver our live Olympics streaming experience across multiple platforms. Desktop audiences enjoy the full interactive video offering, but we have ensured all 24 streams of coverage are available to audiences on all four screens (PC, mobile, tablet and connected TV) as well as Red Button.

The BBC's gallery at the International Broadcast Centre in Stratford

When the event starts, cameras filming trackside send their video coverage via the BBC's gallery at the International Broadcast Centre in Stratford to BBC Sport's new production HQ in Salford, where it is prepared for different devices. This encoded video is then sent to our content distribution network (CDN) ready to be delivered to audiences.

Data

At the same time, a whole host of data about the event is being sent by Olympics Broadcasting Services (OBS) to our database. Key event stats, schedule information, and highlights logged by trackside observers all flow into our content store. We also have a team of loggers in Salford who augment that data to make sure all the key moments are marked - concentrating on the Team GB athletes.

Video and data together

At the end of this process, the video and the data come together to deliver the full BBC Olympics live interactive video experience.

Video is loaded into the player, which figures out which event is playing and displays the appropriate data from the database (brought to audiences in the Extras panel at the bottom right of the player when you watch on desktop).

Schedule information enables us to provide info about which events are live now and who is currently competing (surfaced in the "Olympics Live" data panel of the desktop player).

As the cycling progresses, the logged events sent in from OBS enable us to create chapter markers, so audiences watching on PC can instantly rewind back to the key moments they might have missed, or want to watch again.

This is, of course, a simplified version of the journey from starting gun to smartphone: Oliver Barlett and David Rogers have gone into more technical detail about how we use the OBS data and how it flows through the system. Senior Technical Architect Matthew Clark is also preparing a blog post with more technical detail about the end-to-end delivery chain.

It’s important to emphasise that this is a collaborative endeavour, one that relies on the BBC harnessing the expertise of a number of partners from across the broadcast and technology industry – from OBS to the CDNs, they all play a vital role in this journey.

Hopefully it goes some way to illustrating how many incredible processes have occurred in the background, as you press play and prepare to watch Victoria Pendleton go for gold.

Cait O'Riordan is the Head of Product, BBC Sport and London 2012

There are three key insights we observed:

• This is the multi-platform Games : all four screens (PC, mobile, tablet and connected TV) are seeing huge growth in usage.
• Every event is getting Red Button love : Red Button is proving a hugely popular way for audiences to access any and every event, and we're seeing lots of activity on every one of our 24 streams.
• Online mirrors TV : as with TV viewing, online activity has peaked around the big Team GB medal moments.

We promised Games coverage that you could access anywhere, any time, and it looks like you've been taking us up on that offer.

So let's have a closer look at the stats.

Overall browsers to the BBC Sport website, and the 24 Olympic Red Button streams, have built to huge numbers across the Games so far. A total of 17 million people have watched the 24 Olympic Red Button streams for at least 15 minutes, and we have recorded 18 million unique browsers to the Sport Olympics webpages - with a daily peak of nearly 8 million (UK) and 10.4 (Global), compared with the previous Sport site record of 5.7m (UK) and 7.4 (Global).

Daily reach and cumulative total (millions, 27 Jul to 02 Aug 2012)

We knew before we started that video would be the heart of our Olympics offering, and the data supports our strategy of ensuring every sport from every venue is available to stream: we've seen 29 million total requests for video content across bbc.co.uk/sport since the start of the Games, and the Sport site has seen an uplift of +80% in daily unique browsers.

Usage across different devices

Browsers across each of the online "four screens" (PC, mobile, tablet and connected TV) have all seen an uplift in daily unique browsers of +70% or more since the start of the Games. The number of people accessing BBC Olympics content on mobiles is huge - we saw a peak of 2.3m mobile browsers on Wednesday - and as of today over 1.5 million people have downloaded the BBC Olympics smartphone app on Android and iOS.

% of Unique Browsers by Device Type (27 Jul to 01 Aug 2012)

We saw interesting differences in platform usage at different times of the week. Audiences tend to watch more on PC during the week, while accessing coverage across mobile, tablet and connected TV more during the weekend.

 

% of Unique Browsers By Device Type, split between Weekend and Weekday (legend as above)

 

Peak moments

It's been a thrilling week for Team GB, and there have been a number of large peaks in traffic as audiences switched on to watch the medal wins.

The biggest online video peak we've seen so far was for Bradley Wiggins' win on Wednesday - 729,000 requests online.

Red Button

Wiggins was popular on Red Button too: we saw a peak of 657,200 people watching him win Gold, rather than on the traditional TV channels. However, we get bigger audiences on Red-Button at the weekend when viewers are at home, so the biggest event so far has been the Men's Road Race with Mark Cavendish which drew an audience of 1.3 million.

Number of people watching individual streams (minutes, BARB): minute-by-minute data

Red Button data has proved particularly fascinating with every single Red Button stream seeing at least 100,000 viewers at some point. The chart below shows the percentage of viewing to each stream. We schedule a variety of sports on all the streams, with the most high-profile on the lower numbered channels.

Percentage of minutes viewed per stream (BARB, 27 Jul to 1 Aug 2012)

In summary

• BBC Sport Olympics webpages see 80% uplift in browsers across PC, mobile, tablet and connected TV
• So far, 1.5m people have downloaded the BBC Olympics smartphone app
• BBC Sport website has seen 29m requests for its Olympics interactive video streams
• BBC Sport website saw 729,000 requests for video of Wiggin's medal win
• Every BBC Red Button stream drew 100,000 viewers at some point during Olympics week one

How have you been watching?

We should, of course, put all these stats in perspective: the majority of you are enjoying the Games via flagship coverage on BBC1 and BBC3 on your televisions, especially in the evenings. Our broadcast coverage has been breaking records too: BBC TV viewing of London 2012 has beaten the whole of Beijing in the first 6 days alone. 45.4m have watched at least 15 mins of the Games.

So how have you been watching? There's been an amazing amount of buzz on social media about the BBC's digital coverage, much of it suggesting that we really are in a multi-device world.

Watching @bbcsport on iPad in car on way to London @j_ennis = AMAZING!!! #TeamGB

— Aly Dixon (@alydixon262) August 3, 2012

Realising you can watch the #olympics on your laptop on the bbc website from the comfort of your own bed. Life made.

— Mitch Turner (@MitchTurner) August 3, 2012

thanks bbc app! can watch the Olympics on the go! everyone's a winner!

— Georgia Taylor-Brown (@georgiatb) August 3, 2012

I love the @bbc2012 Olympic App! So much info AND there's a live feed! Just watched @beckadlington swim on the bus back from Hyde Park

— Keri-anne Payne (@KeriannePayne) August 2, 2012

So much sport! The @bbcsport coverage is amazing! Job well done @rogermosey! Archery on TV, & Rowing on the app! #MultiTasking

— Zac Purchase (@ZacPurchase) July 31, 2012

I'd love to find out how you're enjoying our coverage and what devices you have been using - or if you've had any problems with it. Let me know in the comments.

Cait O'Riordan is the Head of Product, BBC Sport and London 2012

Correction: Monday 6th August 2012. The original post contained an incorrect graph under the heading "Red Button". The correct version was substituted at 4 p.m. Saturday 4th August.

And my team managed that within the first 48 hours of live sporting action.

As the Head of Product for BBC Sport, it’s been a fantastic weekend for me and my team watching the Games unfold. Just after 3pm on Saturday afternoon we had all our encoders in action playing 24 live video streams of sporting action across desktop, mobile tablet, connected TVs and Red Button.

And Sunday was the busiest day ever on the BBC Sport site – with 6.1 million unique browsers in the UK and 8.3 million worldwide.

• Saturday - 7.8m global browsers for bbc.co.uk/sport (5.6m UK browsers) – a global record
• Sunday - 8.3m global browsers for bbc.co.uk/sport (6.1m UK browsers) – a global and UK record
• 1.15m downloads for the BBC Sport Olympics app, with 55% of browsers coming from non-desktop devices on Saturday
• 1.7m requests for the Olympics opening ceremony in BBC iPlayer, with 925k on Saturday alone – a record for a single day
• The James Bond Escorts The Queen to the London 2012 Olympic Games clip has been viewed 640k times on the BBC’s YouTube channel.

We have been testing the infrastructure and the sites we have built for the games for months using test data and streams and artificial traffic and we were really confident it would work.

But even so it’s nerve wracking turning it all on and showing it to vast numbers of real users – so we are thrilled that it’s all working so well.

And we’ve been gratified to see such positive feedback, on social networks and via email, about the things we have built.

More than 1.15 million people have now downloaded BBC Sport’s Olympics app for the UK, and we are really pleased that people are staying in touch with the action via the phones while out and about like Mark Ames:

For watching the bits of the Olympic road race happening where you aren't, I heartily recommend the BBC Olympic app:

https://bbcstreaming.pages.dev/sport/0/olympics/18810308 …

 

— ibikelondon blog (@markbikeslondon) 3:18 AM - 25 Jul 2012

The reaction to our new interactive video player has been really positive.

All our live and on demand video sessions are split into “chapters” to make it really easy to find the bit you’re interested in. That feature was used more than 2.5 million times on Saturday, including by Rich ‏@richardarnatt:

The BBC interactive Olympics coverage is incredible! Jaw dropped at how easy it is to jump straight to *any* event in moments.

— Rich (@richardarnatt) 12:11 PM - July 28, 2012

Our favourites feature on the desktop version of the site is also being exercised with more than a million interactions a day.

Now people are back at work the graphs are going skywards with hundreds of thousands of people sneaking a look at our coverage in the office, like Simon Warren:

We've managed to hook up two spare monitors in the office so far this morning, 22 more and we can stream all the bbc's live content.

— Simon Warren (@100Climbs) 2:55 AM - 30 Jul 2012

At around 3pm today, we will have 24 live streams running again and we’re hopeful today’s going to be another record-breaking day. I’ll keep you up to date with the stats as we get them this week.

Cait O'Riordan is the Head of Product, BBC Sport and London 2012

Every event now has a destination page.

Hi – just to remind you that I’m responsible within BBC Future Media for the development of the BBC Sport Website, including our Olympic coverage.

Following the roll-out of the new BBC Sport website (bbc.co.uk/sport) last week, today we are launching some new pages in the Olympics section.

In this blog, I will tell you a little bit about the new pages we are rolling out as well as talk about how your feedback is helping us plan further changes to the BBC Sport website.

These pages pull together news stories, statistics and schedules for the leading figures and activities in this summer’s Olympics.

This is the first in a series of phased deliveries which will eventually result in us publishing a page for every sport, athlete and team present at the Games.

Athlete pages, like those for Victoria Pendleton and Usain Bolt, display the competitors’ key stats and achievements too, as well as their social media links.

Event pages display a countdown to that particular contest’s start date this summer; and very soon this countdown will transform into a full day-by-day schedule leading up to the medal final for that event.

Country team pages summarise the nation’s performance history at the Games, and display which events they’ve excelled at in the past. Users will be able to visually compare each team’s performances on these pages, too.

Sport redesign update

Many hundreds of you have taken the time to feedback on the new design of the Sport site – on my post about the issue and on Ben Gallop’s post on the BBC Sport Editor’s blog.

We are very grateful for you taking the time to do that and we have read every single comment and have identified key areas that we are looking to address.

One of the hot topics is that of the use of the colour yellow. We are looking at measures that will reduce the amount of yellow in the page header whilst also retaining the strong BBC Sport branding.

We also are fixing the bug in the banner some of you flagged up, which is making it flash between black and white as you click between different sections of the site.

Several of you told us that you don’t like the way that video automatically plays when you visit one of popular live commentaries or Sportsday Live pages, so we will be changing that in the near future too.

We are also looking making it easier for you to find our great new sports stats. One of the pages we are really proud of is our new football live scores page – we have had really positive feedback about that page, particularly when it comes to life during a busy weekend of football.

As I have said before, we will not be rushing into changes and we will be using several different sources of feedback to help drive our decision making.

More changes to come

We have several launches lined up in the coming weeks, including a new version of the Olympic Games schedule and bespoke mobile versions of our Olympic pages.

Alongside this will be regular improvements to the Sport site as whole and specific new features for our Olympics pages.

We are also preparing a number of blog posts – one on the user testing and approach we took to redesigning the Sport site, another on the User Experience and Design work and an additional one on the technology that is helping us deliver all these improvements to the BBC Sport site.

Cait O'Riordan is the Head of Product, BBC Sport and London 2012

Mock-ups of the new BBC Sport site

My name is Cait O’Riordan and I am responsible within Future Media for the development of the BBC Sport Website, including our Olympic coverage. Today we have rolled out some major changes to how the site looks and works and I wanted to explain those changes and why we have carried them out.

This redesign is the first major launch of many this year as we get ready to cover the Olympic Games this summer. We are working on some really exciting developments, which will be showcased on the new BBC Sport website.

• Creating a fresh website that better showcases the range of content we offer
• Prominent promotion of our fantastic live coverage from across the BBC
• Making it easier for our users to talk about our sport coverage
• Making it faster for our users to find our great content

We have tried to do this in a way that makes the site easier to use for the millions of people from across the UK and around the world who use the site every week and are confident it will. But we know that, initially at least, the site will take a bit of getting used to.

First major change in nine years

We have spent a lot of time talking to our audience to make sure we get this redesign right and the most consistent piece of feedback we got on the old site was that it looks dated. And that’s because it was dated. The last time we did a major refresh of the site was back in 2003 – ancient history in internet terms.

The BBC Sport website is the most popular Sport site in the UK, attracting an average of 11.5 million browsers a week.

People who use our site regularly have their own ways of getting around it. I have been to a lot of usability testing, where we watch as members of our audience use the site how they would normally when they are at home or at the office.

I am constantly amazed by the number of different and convoluted routes that users take to get to the content they love. Now we have refreshed the site some of those everyday journeys have changed. We are confident that people will be able to find new and easier ways to the content they want, when they want it.

We have shown the new site to users and watched again as they have found their way around the new site easily and naturally.

As well as usability testing we have also done some online surveys with a larger group. We showed the new site to nearly 2,000 people, including regular users of the Sport website, and 80% said they preferred the new to the old, saying it had a modern look and feel with a clear layout.

Putting live at the heart of what we do

People use the Internet very differently now than how they did in 2003 and that is reflected in the reasons why people come to the BBC Sport site. While people continue to come to us for written sports journalism they also want the very latest statistics and live coverage of the biggest sporting events as they happen in text, video, audio and photos – complementing the BBC’s long heritage covering live sport on television and radio.

Pages like our football live scores page showcase our new approach to live coverage – and more changes are coming soon.

Our new approach to live is woven into the whole of our new site – with our live coverage prominently promoted and labelled in blue wherever it appears. We have also made our live coverage more prominent across the site – for example including live football scores on the Sport homepage.

Improving navigation across the site

The major difference you will probably notice first is that we have moved from a vertical navigation to a horizontal one – with the sections of the BBC Sport website listed across the top of every page (underneath the links to the main sections of bbc.co.uk).

This has made it faster for our audience to navigate between different sports. We know that a lot of our audience has an interest in more than one sport but in the past there was no quick way to skip from one sport to another.

If you wanted to navigate from say Golf to Cricket, you had go all the way back to the home page of Sport and start again. Now the most popular sections of our site are just one click away wherever you are on the site.

Moving to a horizontal navigation also gives us a wider page to work with, which means more room for our great content, including larger pictures and bigger video. It also brings the site in line with other major sections of bbc.co.uk, which have a horizontal navigation, like BBC News and iPlayer. Horizontal navigation is also common across the web with Google, Facebook, and Sky Sports just some of the prominent examples.

Ben Gilmore, Interaction Designer, shows me some early designs for our Olympic Schedule

Making choices

The horizontal navigation has less room in it than the old long vertical navigation, which means we have had to make some difficult choices and we didn’t make them lightly.

In order to make the navigation easy to use, we wanted to limit the number of items in the primary navigation to less than nine, to help people make quick choices about where they wanted to get to.

We tested earlier versions of the site with more items in the navigation and people found it harder to use, often missing the “More Sports” link on the right hand side.

We thought long and hard about the best way to choose which sites to include in the primary navigation, before settling on those that are visited most often over the course of the year and which we cover through the 12 months not just around specific events.

They are: Football, Formula 1, Cricket, Rugby Union, Rugby League, Golf, Tennis and Olympics.

The rest of the sporting coverage is now found via a button on the right-hand side of the navigation, called “More Sports”. Clicking on that button reveals a “drop down” menu with all our other sporting sections listed alphabetically. Again, the “More Sports” button is available from wherever you are on the site – making it easier for people to get from one sport to another.

Analysis from the relaunch of the BBC News website which took place in 2010 showed us that when the navigation moves from the left to the top of the page the audience became less reliant on it for all their navigation. Therefore, we ensured that those key sections we could not fit into the navigation – like the Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and England homepages – were prominently promoted on the Homepage.

This refresh of the sport site does not mean we are reducing the breadth of our coverage – our journalists will be covering the same range of sports as they have always done. We’ve just changed the navigation to make it easier to move around the site wherever you are on it.

Doing more with less

One of the reasons why we are able to cover such a wide range of sports is that we have invested in technology which allows our journalists to spend more time creating great content and less time managing that content.

In the past when a journalist wrote a story they would have to place that story on every relevant section of the website.

A story about Arsenal playing Manchester United, for example, would have to be placed manually on the home page, the Football page, the premier league page, the Arsenal page and the Manchester United page – a very time consuming and labour intensive process.

Now the journalists tell the system what the story is about and that story is automatically placed on all the relevant parts of the site.

We are using semantic web technologies to do this, an exciting evolution of a project begun with the Vancouver Winter Games and extended with the BBC’s 2010 World Cup website. It will really come into its own during the Olympics this summer.

It doesn’t end here

The BBC Sport website has hundreds of different sections. We knew we wouldn’t be able to refresh the whole site at once so again we concentrated our efforts on the sections that are most used by our audience.

For example, we know that during the UK football season, the majority of the traffic to the Sport website is to the Homepage and to content in the Football section.

That is why we have targeted our efforts here, with new-look content pages and an enhanced statistics offering that we will roll-out for other sports in the future.

A further 19 sections, like Cricket, Golf and Welsh sport have new home pages. We will also be redesigning the statistics pages that go with those sections in the coming months.

At the same time we will be rolling out the news designs on the homepages and statistics pages of the sports we haven’t been able to tackle in this relaunch – like Snooker and Darts for example.

You will still see some pages with the old design in amongst the new redesign pages until we refresh all the hundreds of sections of the sport site, which might be a bit confusing.

Change will also come a lot quicker from now on – we won’t be waiting another nine years to change the site. Instead of infrequent big bang changes we will be making iterative improvements to the site all the time. We will release new features regularly to the site, so the site will continuously evolve and change, hopefully in a way that is less disruptive for our audience.

Meeting to create the initial wireframes for the new site. Other high-sugar snacks are available.

Talking about sport

We also wanted to make it easier for our audience to talk about Sport and our coverage of it. The new site includes the BBC’s share tools module, which makes sharing content even easier.

Very soon, audiences will also be able to comment on sport stories directly on the sport site for the first time: emphasising the importance of the audiences’ voice to the BBC Sport website.

Talking of which, do tell us what you think

I know people won’t need to be asked twice to give us feedback on what we have done. Our audience is passionate about sport and how we cover it and we love that fact that you are more than happy to tell us what you think.

Other recent high-profile launches of the BBC website have started with a beta version of the site which has allowed people to try out the new sites before they were introduced. For technical and editorial reasons we aren’t able to do this for Sport so, for some, the change may come as more of a shock at first.

We have made some bold design decisions as a result of exhaustive audience research and we are really proud of the new site.

Now it is live we welcome your suggestions as to how the site could be fine-tuned in specific areas as well as general comments and reactions to the new design. Please let us know your thoughts here.

All your feedback will be used to help inform the decisions we make about how best to fine-tune the new-look site as we move through 2012 and beyond.

Cait O'Riordan is the Head of Product, BBC Sport and London 2012

See also:

• Head of Sport Interactive & Formula 1 Ben Gallop's blog post about the new site on the BBC Sport Editors blog
• Claire Stocks of BBC Sport Online responds to comments on Ben's post
• bbc.co.uk/sport 2012 redesign Frequently Asked Questions

The panel was Phil Buckley (Product Lead, Children's), Japhet Asher (Executive Producer, CBBC), Ben Gallop (Head, BBC Sport Interactive and Formula 1) and myself.

Cait O'Riordan is the Head of Product, BBC Sport and London 2012

We shared our strategy for BBC Sport online and showed a preview of the work we are doing to support the BBC's coverage of the London 2012 Olympics.

We showed a 'concept car' consisting of two user journeys which I hope bring to life some of the things we're exploring as we shape our digital offer for London 2012.

Here is a film of our presentation.

Cait O'Riordan is the Head of Product for BBC Sport and London 2012.

12 million UVs to BBC sport in Sept 11, up to 100k concurrent streams. Big numbers #BBCOnline

Lisa Blythman-Wood, VML, liked the "concept car":

#bbconline visual engaging user journeys from BBC sport