VANCOUVER—About a year and a half ago, Ahmed Khalil, designer and producer at CBC began working on the redesign for the CBC Radio 3 website after it became painfully obvious that the existing site was no longer working well enough. “I also did the previous design and what we found was that it was designed for one small service,” says Khalil. “As we expanded and our service grew it became more established in our minds that the site was becoming more and more insufficient in meeting our needs.”


One of the main changes, says Khalil, who worked with the CBC web team on the redesign was giving the content on the site more breathing room. “We found that our content was growing more and more instead of remaining stable,” he says. “We were bringing new services online and shoe-horning them into old templates, which was not ideal.” The new site, he says, has set proportions but not set dimensions so that content can be thrown in or taken out and the site will expand and collapse to suit it.

The amount of colour from the old to the new site has been taken down a notch to let the content shine through, says Khalil. “What I found with the old site was that it had too much style in a way,” he says. “Not that it was particularly stylish. It had too much of a look of its own. I wanted to pull that back with the new site. I wanted whatever stylistic impression the site gave to come from the photos and the blog.” To do that he used more greys, straight lines and rectangles. “The only thing I used colour wise was for the headers above the content,” he says. “That is the one touch of colour friendliness in an otherwise grey and muted landscape.” Contact: Radio3.cbc.ca

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