[6] The website was launched on 4 November 1997, and was headed by founding editor Mike Smartt and Project Director Bob Eggington.

Sunbather worked with consultancy, Lambie-Nairn, who looked after the overall brand, and has been redesigned several times mainly to match the visual style of BBC News television bulletins and to exploit increases in readers' typical screen resolutions.

[12] While the BBC does not censor or change results, the algorithms used tend to give greater weight to national and international sources over regional or local ones.

[15] In line with the introduction of new features across BBC Online, including a new navigation bar, the site was updated in 2008 with wider centred page designs, larger images and an increased emphasis on audio and visual content.

[16] Beginning on 30 April 2009, some published stories included in-text links, mostly to in-site profile articles on people, locations and organisations.

[citation needed] The BBC announced on 19 November 2009 that it was to pay more attention to search engine optimisation by extending news headlines.

[17][18] On 14 July 2010, the site was completely redesigned, with the vertical section headings moved to run horizontally near the top of the page.

The new design, incorporating larger in-line videos within news articles and standardised font usage, was introduced as a first step to bringing the entire BBC website into line with its new style guidelines.

[19] It was met with mixed opinions; Stephen Fry stated his approval of the redesign,[20] and the new design was praised for being "more attractive [and] graphically stronger".

[21] On 4 March 2014, the BBC launched a beta version of the website that was built around the principles of responsive web design, allowing the presentation of content to adjust automatically for a wide variety of screen sizes, from desktop computer to smartphones and tablet devices.

Journalists including Nick Robinson and Kamal Ahmed use blogs to provide updates on current events and topics.

Other favourite areas of discussion included the Flexicon, the gender of Paper Monitor or coming up with sardonic comments about previous letters.

From March 2008 the BBC began to gradually introduce embedded video using the EMP into individual news articles and onto the front page.

Previously, in addition to the standard website with embedded video and audio, there were XHTML and WAP versions optimised for users on mobile devices.

[32][33] A text-only version of the main news website could be accessed via the BBC Betsie text to speech parser (now discontinued).

As of 23 March 2015, separate mobile and text only versions have been removed, and replaced with a "responsive web design", allowing the presentation of content to adjust automatically for a wide variety of screen sizes, from desktop computer to smartphones and tablet devices.

[42] The advertising consists of large animated banners, which has led to complaints that these make the site's content harder to read.