Yeah but every few years they seem to reprogram the entire website in "whatever is most fashionable at the moment". I'm not sure that's a good use of the publics money.
You'd rather we kept with outdated layouts like this[0], forever? Part of rebuilding the website is updating the layout and usability of the website. In order to keep the website usable, the people administering it have to have better tools to organise content on it (as we all know, UX isn't just design, you can't just write a new template over a site with bad UX to make it perfect).
Developers use whatever is most reasonable to use at the time with an eye on it hopefully lasting 5-10 years into the future - much of the BBC website still runs on legacy, unmaintainable Perl, and they've learned their lesson from that.
I'm happy with that "outdated" layout yeah. It's pretty narrow on my screen - but so's the new one. The information is clear and accessible - more so than on the new one, actually. And I'd bet the filesize is smaller and the render time shorter as well.
You are clearly not representative of the target market. If preference were tested, I'm sure the vast majority of readers prefer more recent sites to that old style.
A dominant news site has an obligation to try to look good to it's readers.
The BBC was never supposed to compete in the race to the bottom. If anything I would think the opposite - a plain site becomes the voice of authority. Certainly in the print-newspaper world, the eyecatching, flashy designs are the domain of the tabloids; the more serious newspapers are more restrained, and the public trusts them more.
Either the BBCs "content" is good enough to win out, or it's not. The way that content is presented is of little concern. The BBC website of years ago works just fine.
You've really shown your biases in that statement...
Developers use whatever is most reasonable to use at the time with an eye on it hopefully lasting 5-10 years into the future - much of the BBC website still runs on legacy, unmaintainable Perl, and they've learned their lesson from that.
[0] http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/december/4/...