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The BBC launched its revamped news website today. The redesign is the first since March 2008 and "the biggest rethink of the design of the site since 2003," according to editor Steve Herrmann.

New features include tools to share stories via social media, including Twitter and Facebook, and the ability to personalise the homepage to display news and weather from readers' local areas. The navigation menu has been moved from the left-hand side of the homepage and now runs along the top of the site.

To cater for the increasing number of readers arriving directly on story pages, the new layout features the day's top stories and features displayed across the site. Both the homepage and story pages are designed to give more prominence to new stories and the latest headlines will be flagged with a 'new' badge.

Video content has also been given more prominence across all pages with a new, larger video player and links to a selection of the best multimedia content on every video page.

Herrmann says the BBC is hoping to make the site's video content available to devices which don't support Flash later this year.

In a blog post about the changes posted this morning, he indicates that behind the site redesign there have also been some changes to the production system:

"There's also been some major behind-the-scenes work on our production system which means we'll be able to adapt even more quickly in future, whether to the changing expectations of our users or to new technology as it emerges."

The new site is based on an entirely new content management system, which prevented the BBC testing the redesign in beta as they have done with television catch-up service BBC iPlayer.

Another significant change to the broadcaster's online news offering is the addition of a dedicated site for North America, which will appear automatically for users in the US and Canada. The site will "provide fast and comprehensive coverage of major stories affecting North America" according to its launch page, which cites the General McChrystal affair as the one of the first major news stories to be covered by the new US online team.

A report released last month by paid:Content UK suggested that the BBC were the fifth largest provider of readers to UK newspaper websites, and director of future media and technology Erik Huggers says today that the online team has set a target "to double external linking".

According Huggers, today's online design changes represent a new "global visual langauge" for BBC Online.

"This is part of an ongoing process to make BBC Online feel like one coherent service, rather than a disjointed collection of websites,  which is greater than the sum of its parts."

Some BBC News pages and archived stories will continue to appear in the old design but will be transferred over in the coming days and weeks, says Herrmann. More on BBC News from Journalism.co.uk

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Written by
Joel Gunter

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