I really like the design — there’s a lot going on on the home page but it’s all clearly differentiated and the design elements are large and bold. Your eye is immediately drawn to the features “spotlight” banner highlighting four main stories. The controls underneath the banner image have a clear affordance and relationship to the featured stories.
The “Find a programme” navigation to the right of the image provides a quick way in to finding a radio programme to find out more about it or to stream it — you can either browse by genre or programme title.
Below this is a carousel feature highlighting one programme per day over the last week. It’s easy to use with obvious previous/next controls. I like the use of images too — I never imagined Rabbi Lionel Blue looked like that!
The content keeps on coming below the carousel: popular shows / podcasts and links to leave feedback and get tickets.
One of the interesting things about the design is that its producers were clearly not worried about the “fold” — if you shrink your browser down to 1024 by 800 (or if this is your default screen size) you get cut off around about the programme description in the carousel. See the images below — the first is the full page design and the second the page “folded”. Despite the content run-on, most of the key calls to action are still shown and as a user, I certainly don’t object to a little scrolling over clicking a number of links to get to what I want.
Incidentally another thing I like about the design is the number of images: I really feel that these complement the radio shows and make the site more than just a listings device.
Nice site.
