Recently, both the BBC and Slashdot announced plans to update their respective websites. The most exciting aspect of the announcements? It is up to us – the public – to undertake the designs ourselves.

The BBC

For the BBC, the public is encouraged only to reshape the homepage at www.bbc.co.uk. In all likelihood, the winner will not have his/her design implemented however, this is just an exercise to rethink the way the BBC’s homepage is configured.

It’s wonderful to see a company embracing aspects of the social web. They are encouraging designers to make the BBC a social web destination, combining aspects of Web 2.0 heavyweights YouTube, Flickr, Technorati, and so on. Not only will this be a really fun project to work on (the winner will have their design featured on the homepage for a day), an Apple laptop is up for grabs.

The BBC are taking some flack for trying to get a redesign of their website for the price of a laptop. Those perpetuating these criticisms clearly don’t understand that this is just an effort on the part of the BBC to allow their visitors to provide appropriate and detailed feedback directly related to their homepage design. The design isn’t being used, they are merely gathering ideas at this point.

Slashdot

Slashdot on the other hand, will be implementing their winner’s design. Slashdot’s contest is to retool the CSS file only, they would really prefer not to have to touch any of their underlying code (ahh, the power of CSS!).

It doesn’t seem like they want to stray too far from their current design, but an update is definitely in order. Some entries have already been submitted and it’s fabulous to see the creativity that’s out there.
Slashdot will also be providing a laptop for the winner, along with the much-deserved recognition that will come with the first-place design.

Give It A Shot

I encourage any designers thinking of submitting an entry to read all blog posts, comments, message board discussions, etc. relating to the contests. I’ve spent a lot of my day today reading through a lot of this material, and it has really helped me understand the contests a little better. The deadline for BBC entries is May 25th, while the deadline for Slashdot entries comes a little sooner, May 17th. Get your entries in, I know I’m going to try to submit a couple.