I'm very proud that today we have released a new mobile site for BBC Indonesia in Responsive Design.

New look BBC Indonesia mobile site

As far as I can find this is the world's first responsive website in an Asian language and one of the very first non-English responsive sites.

The Head of the News Product Chris Russell has blogged in detail about Responsive Design, a technology which tests your screen size and connection speed and then gives you the best possible experience. This has already been adopted on our English language mobile News site and the new BBC Indonesia site is on the same codebase.

This technology is particularly well suited to the World Service sites. More than half the visitors to BBC Indonesia come on a mobile phone and they come using an explosion of different handsets: last week alone there were more than 1,200 different phones using the site.

These ranged from the newest Apple smartphones to some Nokia feature phones with local manufacturers heavily represented including the magnificently-named Hipstreet HS-7DTB6 and the rather more straight-laced Moral N01.

In the olden days every single one of these would have seen our standard mobile view:

Old mobile view

But now each of those 1,200 phones will display the best thing they can manage.

Basic phones on poor connections will get an experience similar to our old mobile site, for example an image like this:

Image displayed on phone with slower connections

This is about 3 Kilobytes (Kb) and is very fast to download but heavily pixelated around the neck and shoulders of the North Korean soldier.

People on a faster connection with a bigger screen will get this image:

Image on faster phone

This is about 10.5Kb, is much better quality and will scale up to the size of your screen. This allows us to deliver a great experience across this huge range of phones.

Coder James Lee tests his work on a Nokia C3 and other phones

Another real advantage of the new site is its speed. I have watched videos of people testing this in Jakarta and it is lightning fast, often at least as fast as sites hosted locally.

My career, such as it is, has been in technical and product development - I have no journalistic experience nor do I speak Indonesian.

However, one of the things which struck me during this project is what a fantastic site BBC Indonesia is. I have been testing this site several times a day for the last month and it has amazed me how often there is something new and how interesting the stories look. The pictures are clear and high quality and the journalism seems well suited to mobile phones with short paragraphs and regular breaks. So I hope that our new site carries this content better than the old and gives it the presentation, speed and usability it deserves.

Do let me know your feedback - I would especially love to hear from Indonesian speakers - and whatever you do, let 'kalau tidak rusak jangan diperbaiki' be your watchword.

Phil Buckley is the Executive Product Manager for FM News World Service.

N.B. This post was amended at 1515 on 6th December 2012. As Phil explains in his comment below responsive design does not explicitly test for correction speed.

The app offers two different default homepages

A month or so ago I blogged about the iPhone app for the BBC Russian service, and about how we hoped to roll out further apps very quickly; and today you can see the next step with the release of our iPhone app for our Latin American Spanish Service, BBC Mundo.

Well, much of this time was taken up with the App Store approvals process - it takes a couple of weeks for them to perform quality control checks on the code.

We have also tuned the app for the Latin American markets. So, as well as the international social networks you can share articles via the popular Spanish network Menéame. You can also make the latest news stream ('Ultimas noticias') your default homepage in preference to the headlines ('Principales noticias'). On the BBC Mundo website as in much of Latin America the simple stream of the latest news is one of the most popular sections, so if you prefer to see this first you can now do so by clicking on the configuration ('Configurar') icon.

Finally, our chief developer Adam managed to fall down the stairs and injure his ankle in this period. Thankfully he is now doing fine.

More about BBC Mundo

BBC Mundo (originally the BBC Latin American Service) is, like Russian, one of our oldest services. It started broadcasting radio in 1938 and its website started in 1998 under the title 'BBC Línea Directa' (BBC Direct Line).

BBC Direct Line in 1998. Sadly the telephone-on-wheels logo just got cropped out of this screengrab.

Both radio and internet services were rebranded BBC Mundo in 2000.

It stopped broadcasting radio in 2011 and has been a fully digital (i.e. internet only) service since then.

During these 74 years, BBC Mundo has seen vast changes in both politics and economics, of which the latest is a huge growth in smartphone and tablet take up in Latin America , (see some 2010 data on the growth of smartphones). Hopefully the users in this exciting market will like the offline browsing possibilities and app interface.

BBC Mundo in 2001

As always, I would like to thank the team for their excellent work on this - and I look forward to blogging about more apps and operating systems soon.

Phil Buckley is Executive Product Manager, BBC Future Media World Service

World Service Russian iPhone App Homepage

I'm delighted to say that we released a News App in Russian for the iPhone yesterday.

You can find the BBC News app (Новости Би-би-си) in the App store and get stories, breaking news, and video in Russian delivered straight to your mobile.

This is the latest step in a long history of Russian output. World Service Radio started broadcasting the occasional show in Russian in 1942 (see slide 11 on the link), and became a full service in 1946.

Since last year the service has been internet only and BBC Russian is a full service news site, with 30+ articles a day along with audio and video content, the best of which is now available in the app.

Unlike the website however, the app allows you to browse offline. This should be very useful for anyone with variable internet access; we also know that some of our audience simply prefer using apps to the browser on their phones.

How we built and tested the app

This is the first foreign language app the BBC has produced and we hope there will be many more. However, building an app for all the World Services's 27 languages on every platform would be hugely expensive. So, we hope we have an innovative solution to this, by using a system called PhoneGap, which allows you to develop apps for a number of operating systems from a single codebase. This should allow us to roll out not only the app code to more of our languages, but also the Russian app to other operating systems such as Android.

Hot PhoneGap coding action

We're starting with Russian both because of the elections taking place on March 4, but also because the Cyrillic alphabet is actually less of a problem than may appear. Russian reads left to right, and has a limited number of letters - so although the text takes up slightly more room, the app can follow an English language pattern relatively easily. This is how Vladimir Putin's is written in Latin, Cyrillic, Arabic, and Hindi:

• Vladimir Putin
• Владимир Путин
• فلاديمير بوتين
• व्लादीमीर पुतिन

The BBC's Bridget Kendall and Vladimir Putin in a News Online web chat, 2001

Testing however is a proper challenge - even our native speakers in London can't test the performance of the app in Russia itself. So, for this app we have worked with a company called uTest who supplied us with an army of testers across Russia. These guys charge per bug found - so it's obviously worth our while to get as perfect a version as possible before we send it to them; but they found a few obscure bugs which we have now corrected.

As a manager, you are often claiming credit for presenting work other people have actually done - and this is particularly true here as work had started before I joined the World Service team. So I'd like to take this opportunity to thank all who have worked so hard to get this app out. I would be very pleased to hear from any Russian speakers as to their experiences with it.

Phil Buckley has moved from CBBC/CBeebies to be Executive Product Manager, BBC Future Media World Service

My editorial colleagues Japhet Asher, Rachel Bardill, and I gave a talk on Thursday 17 November to a group of suppliers, both to introduce those new to children's content to what we do, and also to meet talented new agencies who might be interested in our upcoming work.

As always, the BBC is not responsible for any risque/ off message jokes:

Phil Buckley is Product Manager, CBBC and CBeebies

#bbconline games page as important as the homepage for CBBC

Johan Jardevall of Valtech welcomed moves towards HTML5:

Happy to see html5 being investigated for use in future CBBC games - good fun watching the games demos #BBCOnline

But Emma Cooper of Team Cooper Limited disagreed:

#bbconline briefing, very much focusing across 4 screens, experimenting w/html5 games despite taking what can be produced back 10yrs

The product update had plenty of chances to include games and fun. Laura Ellis, BBC Head of New Media in Birmingham, drew life lessons:

very fine demo of BBC Childrens' game 'Moo Spew' by @mrrobinmorley. Moral: Never kidnap a cow and take it on a boat #bbconline

Edd Uzzell, Sony, appreciated the BBC Newsround word search, which asked youngsters to find "Seb Blatter" and "racism" in a grid.

A highlight from #BBCOnline conference was the great word search on #CBBC site. BBC news should add this to imgur.com/3xWPL

Something Special: the Out and About game

I remember extremely clearly when the first series of Something Special came out in 2005. We accompanied the series with a website, and as the TV show was aimed at children with special needs we made the site as simple and usable as possible.

 

I liked the site, but didn’t think too much about it until some feedback was sent round following broadcast of the TV show: pages and pages of emails from parents saying how deeply their children had been affected. Some said that that the whole family appreciated the support in learning the signs; some that their children were so happy to see people like themselves on TV; and others their children had started to communicate with them for the first time using the signs from the show. Tears poured down my face. Even thinking about it now, I still feel the pride in working here which I felt then.

For the techies among you, you may be interested to know that we have always chosen Adobe Flash to make our accessible games. Historically Flash was seen as inaccessible due to blind people being unable to use screen reader tools with it; our research and testing showed that special needs schools almost always used Flash due to the quality and simplicity of the interactions it allowed. The question therefore became how to use Flash in an accessible a manner as possible.

With Something Special now reaching its hundredth episode, we have tried to increase the accessibility even further with the ‘out and about’ game released last week.

This includes some extremely simple games - such as Pop the Balloons, and Tumble Faces where you click on Justin’s nose and he makes a funny face - along with more signs to learn and some videos of Justin and Mr Tumble. The site also allows huge amounts of customisation, so that carers can make sure that the site works for all the children they work with.

Our Senior Designer Ian Hamilton will post a blog with more detail about the Something Special website and how we developed it; though I would like to take this opportunity to thank the rest of the team who worked on this too, including Aardman Digital, the agency who produced the game, for all their fantastic work. More information on switch accessibility is available on the recently improved My Web My Way accessibility pages which are designed to help all users get the best from BBC Online as a whole, and the wider web.

Phil Buckley is Product Manager, CBBC and CBeebies

For children's websites this is especially true: children are just learning how to use computers, and when the sands shift they can no longer find what they want. Usage of your site can go down, and audience appreciation - a metric essentially based on asking people if they like the site or not - tends to tank, at least in the short term.

So a few months ago I blogged about how we were trying to address this by using a 'no-more-tears' approach to re-launching CBBC. Instead of a big bang, we started by keeping the design as it was and releasing major functionality improvements piece by piece; when children were used to moving their mouse in certain ways to get certain things, we unrolled a new design on top.

Did that actually work?

Well, that all seemed very clever - and those of you who are feeling so inclined would be very welcome to vote for CBBC as the relaunch of the year in .Net magazine's awards in fact. However, since then we have been monitoring our statistics to see if it Actually Worked, and if we should repeat this approach for CBeebies; a hugely loved site and one with an audience at an even earlier stage of using computers.

On balance, we concluded that the answer is yes. While we were releasing the new functionality on CBBC, the audience appreciation actually went up. When we unrolled the new design on 11 April, as expected we got a number of comments, not all of which were positive. However, most people preferred the new design, and there was even a clear majority saying that the new site was easy to use post-relaunch. Meanwhile in a vote on Wired magazine's kind review of the new CBBC site 65% said that they thought the new site was better than the old, while, a further 24% even claimed that they their children hadn't noticed the change.

Therefore, today we put the CBeebies website through the first stage of a no-more-tears relaunch, taking it from this:

To - and come with me here - this:

Ta da! Come on!

Has anything actually changed here?

This is certainly the first re-launch I have been involved in for which I expect not a single negative comment from the audience; or indeed any comment at all. The only change that the audience may notice is that - ahem - in a couple of places our old system was creaking at the seams and some of our sub-indices were a bit flakey. They no longer are.

However, this work puts us in a very good place to roll out further changes across the CBeebies website. We've just updated our CBeebies Grown Ups site so that it is significantly more integrated with this new CBeebies, allowing parents to see much more closely how the content on CBeebies supports your child's development - you can read more about the improvements to Grown Ups here. Over the coming months we will be adding new features and hopefully improving the site even further.

There are other advantages to doing this. Firstly, now that CBBC and CBeebies are on the same technical system our editorial teams can work more efficiently; and when we do make developments to one site it will be easy to share this to the other.

It is also an essential building block to getting CBeebies and CBBC sites onto other screens such as mobile devices. Our Future Media Director Ralph Rivera has blogged about "one service, ten products, four screens" and this, perhaps the least dramatic relaunch in the history of the internet, is moving the children's products along that path. I hope to come back to the blog soon to talk about what CBBC and CBeebies will do on smartphones and other devices.

Finally, heaven knows it is significantly easier to come on here and show off these wonderful websites than it is to actually build them, so I would like to take this opportunity to thank the team involved for all their excellent work.

Phil Buckley is Product Manager, CBBC and CBeebies

To my amazement, it was none of these: it was the children's news service Newsround. I say amazed as I knew that the site had not been touched for a number of years and was still in an older BBC templating system that was, unlike the rest of CBBC, left aligned and small in size.

So, I did more research by looking into our search logs - and of all the brands we had, Newsround was the most searched for.

Children were also searching for news stories and people directly - certainly celebrity searches such as 'alicia keys' were in there, but also things in the news that children wanted to understand: in June 2010, there were more searches for 'oil spill', and 'animal testing' than for 'justin bieber'.

Recently Ralph Fiennes (who plays Voldemort in the Harry Potter films) and Nicola Roberts were among our top searches, but 'earthquakes' and 'waves' performed strongly too. Over this period we have also helped children on topics such as 'unicef' 'ice melting', 'refugees', and even 'what to do if you are struck by lightning'.

The headline I took from this - apart from The Kids Are All Right - was that Newsround was performing a huge role in helping children understand the world and that this was highly valued - both for their homework and for their general interest.

So I am delighted to say that the neck muscles of the children of Britain will no longer be cramped by turning to one side: today we are relaunching the Newsround website, and it is now the same width as the rest of the CBBC site and other BBC sites, in another move towards making BBC Online feel like a more cohesive whole.

In the relaunch the key has not been to extend the functionality greatly but instead to improve what was already a valued service.

Articles will still come with pictures, but the pictures are bigger, of higher quality. The articles are easier to read and have interactions to engage children as they go down the page.

We have also added some fantastic galleries to show off this photographic content more. Finally we have also cleaned up the architecture greatly: in our user testing it turned out that some news categories meant little to children so we have simplified our indexing to News, Sport, Entertainment, and Animals. My friend and colleague Daniel Clarke talks about the editorial drivers to refreshing Newsround here.

However, we have made a big effort to integrate Newsround more with the rest of the CBBC website. The top navigation now contains a pretty complete picture of what CBBC offers: shows, games, watch [clips and episodes], music, things to do, and news. This I hope gives a good picture of what the CBBC product is: a hub for primary school children whether it is time to play, to laugh, to be creative, or to learn about what is happening in the world.

Earlier this year I blogged about the "(Hopefully) no more tears" approach which we used to release the rest of the website. It has been much harder to step out changes with Newsround: the technology was too old and the designs too different. We have introduced children to parts of this by bringing Newsround more to the fore on the CBBC homepage, and adding News to our top navigation in advance of the relaunch; but my hope is that the site refresh is so obviously an improvement that children will come with us on this.

Now: I come on here, set the blog editor some formatting problems and crack some jokes. The actual work is done by a very talented team who deserve all the credit, and I would like to express my thanks to them. As with the rest of the CBBC site, I hope this is a good example of highly skilled people from editorial, technical, and design backgrounds, working together to create a product that really delivers what our audiences need.

Phil Buckley is Product Manager for the BBC Children's portfolio, BBC Future Media

To give you a sample, when the CBeebies website was relaunched in 2007, the message boards, also here, were hit by comments like:

 

 

 

And this is the saddest story I have ever heard:

 

These reactions can reflect real problems: sometimes when sites go live, users see things straight away to which you have become blind while working on the project. At the very least it can provoke the same anger and frustration you get when you walk into a supermarket and discover that they have moved all your favourite stuff around.

So it is with some trepidation that I tell you that we have just completed the relaunch of the CBBC website.

Why have you done that crazy thing?

I wrote a Blackadder-esque romp through the history of the CBBC website a while ago - but to summarise, the feedback we got from children was that while they loved our content, they couldn't find a lot of it. So we have concentrated on unlocking this content by making it easier to find, and when children have finished enjoying a game or a something creative, suggesting something that they might like equally as much Or Even More.

How have we managed the audience through this?

Like most releases, the new work has been heavily user tested, and we have also been warning children of the changes via our message boards.

However, the main thing we have done in an attempt to avoid tears has been to release the new website in stages. So, we began by leaving the design exactly as it was, but improving the functionality. This meant that in January our section of great creative things for children to do went from its old design and being in two sections called 'Grab' and 'Create':

 

To a new and clearer name of 'Things to Do', still within the old design but with better functionality and all the content ordered:

 

This means - hopefully - that children have become used to moving their mouse into a particular space to do a particular thing. This week we have released the new visual design onto the site, so Things to Do now looks like this:

 

Similarly, on February 21 our fantastic children's Games section went from this:

 

To this

 

And yesterday to this:

 

And in theory at least, children will not have any problems getting around the new site as they have already been doing it.

What didn't we worry about?

Releasing these sections one by one has led us to at times some very lumpy user-journeys. Children will have seen new functionality on some sections before others, animations and noises coming and going, and as each section has been released it has moved to the new BBC masthead which is shorter than our old one.

The old (below)...

 

...was 58 pixels...

 

...while the new (left) is 38.

So as children have gone between old and updated sections over the last couple of months, the masthead and the content underneath it will have gone up and down like soufflé.

The team did worry about this, but amazingly, we haven't had a single complaint or even comment on the topic: children have apparently just got on with it.

So what has been the audience reaction?

We have directly asked children both in user testing and via our message boards what they thought, and what reaction there has been to the section releases has so far been positive. Things to do's message board got:

 

While the games messageboard said:

 

And when our section of funny video clips for kids, Watch was released, the watch comments were:

 

But let me not deceive you.

The main reaction to the releases has been an ocean - an ocean! - of indifference, a pacific lack of comments. We had message board threads open and stuck at the top of the page for days before someone took pity on us and commented. Still, we have user tested and have been able to fold in feedback, and the usage statistics for each section have increased on each release. So, we are optimistic that the lack of comments is because children have had no problems using the site and are simply delighted; but our optimism is cautious.

What has happened now?

Yesterday we layered on the new design across the site. Design changes are the most obvious, and also the homepage itself has not had an interim update, so we expect to hear a bit more about the changes. The homepage did look like this:

 

And now looks like this:

 

[Note that the legendary 'pull' navigation system I blogged about earlier has somehow survived in the 'try this' section at the bottom right]

The site has been heavily user tested to positive reactions, but in case we have missed something, we do have still have people working on this project and will be able to fix it. However, there may be a delay of up to a month for our next release as the BBC gears up for a frenzy around the CBBC complaints area Royal Wedding.

Personally I am hugely proud of this release and I hope that the way we have managed the change and the website as a whole are testimonies to increasing collaboration between tech and editorial - great content, easily surfaced - as promised in the recent announcements around Putting Quality First. I would again like to thank the team for their tremendous efforts in getting it out; do let me know if the changes have made you laugh or cry.

Phil Buckley is Portfolio and Product Manager, BBC Childrens and BBC Future Media

The first CBBC website

The first incarnation of the CBBC website appeared back in 1995: in this video you can see it being introduced by Toby Anstis. The world was a different place back then, and I should warn you that statistically 3.4 of you will actually die laughing while watching this, so please view with assistance nearby.

I have scoured our archives and there is just no record of the page Toby introduces still in existence; but here I have found a version of the site from 1998:

There are a couple of nice touches here: in those days we used the Comic Sans font which is now prohibited in the contracts of our designers, and it also includes one of my favourite sentences on the entire internet which I have stolen for the title of this blog post:

There was also an animated version of the site, hence the reference to the 'Normal version', but the animated one apparently included 'a massive rocket'.

The digital hub of Children's lives

There are two recurring themes I will write about today, and if we move forward to 1999, you will see the first of them emerging:

Comic Sans has now been dropped, but you also see a great example of the phenomenal breadth of content that is the cornerstone of CBBC:

This juxtaposition is a particularly heroic one, but for me, the ability to cover many parts of life, introducing them to children in a way that is both engaging and not patronising is a core strength and indeed essence of CBBC, both on TV and online.

We see this again on the CBBC homepage on September 11, 2001.

Managing increasing amounts of content

Later in 2001 we see the first emergence of my second theme: the website struggling to cope with the sheer volume of this content:

This continues in 2002. At this time, CBBC got its own TV channel, and content for younger children was spun off into another channel and website: CBeebies. So, there was now less to show, but how to show it all remained a problem:

In 2005, for the first time, CBBC moved into a technical platform designed to manage content, which addressed some of these problems:

The content remains both varied and magical: as well as a cartoon about spies called The Secret Show, there is some content around 'Saving Planet Earth', again an area of huge concern for children. In the bottom row there are tips for staying safe on the internet, and also children's voices directly on the CBBC homepage in the 'Message Boards' section - albeit (ahem) with a bug on the example above so no messages are actually showing. It worked some a lot of the time.

However, in 2007 the legacy content management system the CBBC website was being phased out and this website went back to being managed editorially. This was accompanied by a fantastic new design:

However, after the first set of 7 shows which are chosen by the CBBC team, it is actually randomised as to which ones appear: every user testing session we go on includes a hugely depressing 30 seconds or so while children pull the lever as many times as is necessary to see the logo of their favourite show.

The relaunched CBBC website: allowing the CBBC audience to find exactly what they want

So what we have we arrived at today? The CBBC homepage remains as above, but if you go into the section marked 'Things To Do' in the top menu you will move into a modern, database driven website.

You will notice that there is not a vast visual difference between this and the previous version of the site: this is both because Things To Do is side by side with sections still in the old system, and a reflection of the visual strength of the current design.

However, over the coming weeks, you will see firstly that the other sections will be are moved into the new system and benefit from all the architectural advantages, and then, when the whole website is ready, we will tweak the design further. This will include replacing the 'Pull' lever navigation: no 'clippy' style wake is currently planned, but suggestions are welcome. The Games section is coming next, followed by Watch.

I'll post again when the further sections are out, but please let us know what you think.

I'd also like to thank the team for their tremendous efforts in delivering what I think is a fantastic website.

Phil Buckley is Portfolio and Product Manager for BBC Children's and BBC Future Media & Technology