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Great to see a fresh new website for Radio 3. I notice the change in 'pattern' from the red, white and blue musical stave to spirograph-like shapes. Will this be a concurrent change to replace the Radio 3 look over all? e.g. on the Ö÷²¥´óÐã Radio page and on the iPlayer/Radioplayer?

Thanks for comment. Yes, we are going to be replacing the old 'swirls' with what everyone is calling the new spirograph style patterns. That's across several different platforms (Radioplayer, iPlayer, Red Button, mobile) so it'll take a few days to work its way round. All from the latest Radio 3 branding kit. Posted by Gabriel, Interactive Editor.

The site looks great - but unfortunately the HD sound button is broken. Instead of playing the HD sound, it takes you to the HD sound help page.

The HD sound itself is working fine for those that can find a way to access it.

It would be nice if the HD button worked as it used to before this change. Yesterday, I could only get it to pop out from the home page, not anywhere else. Today, it won't even work from there. Hope this'll be sorted out by the tine the Proms start!

I quite like the 'Guardian' white spaces (text with plenty of 'air' around it) but the size of the largest headlines does look like a 'Show and Tell' child's reading book (Playlists, Latest from the blog, Listen, Discover - and on other pages similarly). I've decreased the text size in my browser which still leaves the headlines large and the text now quite small, so still quite a bit of scrolling down the page to do. I know that's part of the design concept, but black-on-white white-on-dark are easy to read anyway without the headlines being that big.

The effect is of taking up a lot of space 'showing' and telling' rather more than is needed.

Does 'Events and Tickets' need that much space on the homepage? It would be more useful to have a box with a link to The Radio 3 Forum :o)

The HD link works from Firefox but not from Google Chrome.

Re HD: It didn't work for me with Firefox 5 (but did with Safari). I uninstalled Adobe Flash Player and reinstalled. Now the HD button works in Safari and Firefox.

But it still doesn't work with Opera and Camino (I'm on a Mac) where I just get a message to 'Download Adobe Flash Player to view this page'.

With Firefox I simply got a succession of pop-up Help boxes.

Sincere apologies about the broken HD sound link. We fixed first thing this morning, so it should work as normal across all browsers now. Really sorry for frustration caused, we added too many redirects away from the old site, hence why you were seeing the help page.
The HD 'pop up' needs Flash. If you use multiple browsers, it's my experience that Flash may need seperately installing for each. Beyond the scope of this post to go into more detail, but there should be advice out there.

sorry to pour cold water on all the excitement, however I think the new website is pants :(
i can't find anything, not even a home page button! the HD button still doesn't work despite claims that it has been fixed, and i now have someone telling me that due to rights restrictions this part of the programme is unavailable.
come on Ö÷²¥´óÐã, you can do better than this!

I was doubtful that the HD button had been fixed. It did not work for me in IE9 or Chrome. However it did work in FireFox, Safari and Opera. The problem seems to be that the browser caches the redirection to the help page. It was easy to fix in Chrome by clearing the caches. It worked in IE9 on a machine where I had not tried the new site in its broken state.

I could not find where IE9 had it cached. I could make it work by turning off protected mode - but that is not a good thing to do. The solution was to navigate to it using the https protocol. That caused a redirection to the correct address and overwrote the duff cached version - after which everything worked as it should.

So try /radio3/hd-sound/ You should only need to do it once and then the button in the web page may be fixed.

Well I posted a comment a couple of days ago about links that don't work. But that message hasn't appeared ...

Just a thought but it might have been a reasonable plan to test out ALL of the mechanics of the earlier site ( where there were loads of ancient broken links ) before automatically reinstating them on the new one.



PS

I noticed the other day a selection of messages where listener/licence payers voiced an assortment of complaints. Can't seem to find those (off)messages either. Very odd ...

The site looks attractive and I can find all I want on it. But you have made the same mistake as your colleagues on the News website last year, which they eventually changed because of many protests - the lack of a left margin to the pages makes them very difficult to read. Please can we have a small gap to the left of the text to define it better

I would like to listen the archives of classical music. Have they been removed ?

I don't suppose there's any possibility of displaying diacritics properly? If not (and if not, why not?), it's better to omit them than posting incomprehensible gibberish as here: /programmes/b00ntbn3 :

Kalējs kala debesīs (Blacksmith hammered in the sky)
Ov’é lass’, il bel viso?
György Orbán
Ne óuri, ne sejaj

That said, much commonly available free software is able to cope with this and Radio 3 should do so as a point of professionalism.

Now the speech and drama page has been completely confused. I cannot now see what is coming up on DRAMA ON THREE, nor THE ESSAY; nor get to a page where all the programmes on DRAMA ON THREE, THE ESSAY, THE SUNDAY FEATURE, or BETWEEN THE EARS currently available on the IPlayer are listed. I have to go through the schedule page to find them. Who said that 'new' was 'better'?

@laurenceraw On the Arts and Drama page there is a module (on the left hand side under Listen) listing all current iPlayer programmes with those programmes included.

Yes, Paul (message 11), I posted a less than laudatory comment a few days back and that has disappeared. I do not like the new website or the creeping move towards a merged Radio 3 and Radio 2 that it seems to represent. Maybe I'll be able to get a comment out of RW when I next see him, maybe not.