The BBC Trust has reported that the BBC has spent more than it should on its web portal. Not by a little either, apparently they’ve overspent by 48% of the baseline budget. As TV license payer I’m happy for them to do so!

The BBC (because of the unique way it is funded) has for many decades provided fantastic programming. It’s one of the World’s most trusted brands and I for one use the BBC News website many times daily.

I’ve never quite understood some people’s negative opinion of the BBC expanding online - some seem to think they should be concentrating just on TV. This is a little short sighted as currently all media seems to be migrating to the web and I myself can’t see why this is much different that the BBC expanding from radio to TV. The BBC are as usual pushing into this area with excellent results - just look at iPlayer.

People also seem to forget that the BBC can actually make money from other sources than the license fee and the Internet opens up a lot of revenue streams for them.

So personally I want the BBC to keep spending my TV license fee as they are doing - I’m looking forward to all the innovation they create!

For most this screen resolution has been gone for some time however from a web development perspective a lot of websites still ensure that 800 x 600 screens have no horizontal scrolling. This was originally because it was thought a large enough percentage of visitors were still using this resolution however the fact that some high profile (and benchmark) website are still optimised for 800 x 600 and above certainly hasn’t helped to see this limiting factor being removed. A lot of people have been saying this for a long time - Screen Resolution and Page Layout.

The new style that BBC News have just adopted shows that they now think this small resolution is now dead and finally we can use some of the unused browser space. Isn’t it so much easier to read? Lets hope everyone follows the lead if they haven’t already.