BBCrap

Roll up Roll up for the online horror of the year.

The BBC has rebuilt and redesigned its cbeebies site for under-10 kids. What was a site that gave 3 year olds complete web mastery is now impossible to navigate, poorly designed, and mostly broke.

Yes it looks pretty.

But it's organised by categories that are meaningless to children.

They used to be able to select a character and then find all the activities they wished under that person/toy/animal. Perfect. That's how small minds work.

Now they have to identify first what output mode of production they want (stories, games, painting etc) and then they can select the character. Small kids don't work like this. They are multitaskers and their motivation for a character can and should drive them to experiment in all kinds of output modes.

The page of characters (now called "shows") organises them by alphabet in such a way that you can only ever see a dozen at a time. Gone is the miraculous gallery of friends that you could recognise and click to. Instead, get literate and get spelling. Navigate six pages of names, or scroll down a master-sheet of all characters that is three pages long.

The home page does offer "picks" - what they'd like to recommend your kids to do. (That's what the BBC means by choice !). But these choices are below the fold so unless your kid knows how to scroll down, they will never want to discover anything.

The old site was a treasure trove. This is blah and unworkable. I predict the children and their parents will drift away and stay away in their droves from what has hitherto been one of the best and most popular sites in the world.

BBCrap