Thursday, August 26, 2010

Letting Visitors Customize Your Webpage

I've really been enjoying the BBC website. If you haven't taken a look at it recently, check it out:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/

What's so wonderful about it is that you can make it be the website you want it to be. No signing up or registration necessary (good luck talking corporate America into using that approach)--just drag and drop the different page elements where you want them to be--and it REMEMBERS the next time you visit. Don't like business news? Just click the X to remove it from sight. Focused on the weather? Drag it to the top of the page.

And suddenly that page goes from being the BBC homepage to being my own personal source of information, customized by me for me. Which also makes it much more usable, and makes me a lot more likely to go back to that page when I'm looking for news that I know I'll find relevant.

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