If you spotted Tuesday’s little tweak to TopGear.com you might be wondering where Cupholder and Foreman have gone.
Following our big relaunch back in October last year, we’re planning some further revisions to TopGear.com, based on your feedback and research we’ve carried out into the way people use the site.
One of the things we’ve decided to do is simplify our news and blogs sections. We think it’ll be easier for you to find stuff if we don’t split it all up. We only have one place for ‘The News’ on the telly, so we thought we’d only have one place here.
And that’s under the ‘News’ tab in the main navigation. There you’ll find news split into three simpler categories: car news, telly stuff and Formula One. Easy. Don’t worry, under ‘car news‘ we’ll still have all the life-endangering YouTube clips and insider industry stuff, only they’ll be easier to track down.
But these things never stop moving. Since pulling the lever on the new TopGear.com last October we’ve been constantly tinkering and improving the site – and we’ve even more plans for the next few months.
If you want your voice heard while we’re fiddling with what is, essentially, your website, you’ve got two options: drop us a line or leave us a note here on this blog (we will be reading them).
Do you want more web-exclusive video? Content from the presenters? More serious car info? More games? Or just more stuff blown up? Let us know. Please.
Hardcore Hammond and Clarkson action… ..ew, I grossed myself out. Ok, well I’d enjoy more car news myself, but blowing stuff up is good as well.
Personally, I always found Sunday Afternoon Blog to be something separate in my brain from both Foreman and CupHolder. I thought of these two as having the same topics but one being more serious than the other. I like all three, but I still think Formula 1, and actually all motorsports, deserves a blog apart.
DO IT.
And no more Transmission blog ?! Is the Mole going to report again ?
I’m not quite sure of the logic behind that – Cupholder seemed to get more responses than quite a few of the other sections put together. I’m a bit concerned that a lot of the lighthearted and irreverent content that made Cupholder entertaining won’t find a place among the more serious news, and in all honesty I’m not sure it should. The vast majority of the best Cupholder posts wouldn’t fit into any of the news categories that are left.
More car news, but if any of your writers ever get bored, a look at some older classics would be nice, with maybe some comparisons on their newer counterparts. Some of the best deals on the market are on older cars after all (e.g. an old 911 for £8k…)
But that’s more a journalism suggestion than a website suggestion. Does it count?
I with Kuang on this one. Totally agree.
Actually, some nice reviews of “new” classics would be good. Older cars that have a certain something special. Collector’s things. Classic cars that would make you happier than buying a new Mondeo.
I’m not convinced about this ‘making it easier to find stuff’; surely occasional visitors to the site will just waste time looking for Cupholder etc, and people wanting serious car news will have to trawl through pages of Ken Block videos to find it. Also, as someone with half a brain, I’ve never found it difficult to ‘find stuff’ on Topgear.com anyway.
Guys, you do great photography for topgear, but the photos on the site are low-res!
Please bring back wallpapers.
Thank you!
Kuang, you make a fair point. I am a little concerned about mixing up the content too, but too many categories made things harder to find.
And there was a surprising overlap between Cup, News and Foreman at times, which meant lots of clicking between sections for people looking for similar content.
Anyway, this is the first of a number of site changes so we’ll see how it goes and bear the results in mind for the next update.
Thanks for your comment.
Is clicking between sections too challenging for Topgear.com users, then?
However, I do agree with Paul Regan that Foreman and News did overlap and occasionally covered the same topics.
I think that there should be more games, im bored of the games already on this site. perhaps redo the one with the reasonably priced car that you used to have before the relaunch last october.
Maybe wallpapers, and the calender that changed every month that used to be on the bbc.co.uk/topgear website that i used to have as my background before you relaunched that site. ummm … maybe a bit more carbage.
Apart from that, there is nothing wrong with this site.
The one and only wrong thing about the site for me is ‘THIS VIDEO CANNOT BE PLAYED IN YOUR REGION’ or whatever it exactly says. I am from Russia. we don’t have Top Gear DVDs or at least there’s no easy way to buy them. Noone watches the show on the stupid TV channel that had the idea to show it (with a terrible translation), coz the channel is crap itself and the timing is worst possible.
I buy the Top Gear magazine and will keep doing so, no matter what i see here in a video. And if i didn’t buy it, i would less likely start being dismissed from my favourite car web-site because of my country of origin.
So, not showing the vids to us, poor Russians, has just one clear result – you make the few English-speaking car-loving of us slightly angrier.
Please. Don’t.
My biggest gripe with the current site is the News comments section – no paragraphs, a few bugs that mean comments get posted twice, or not at all. In fact the general website doesn’t come across as overly stable, but I guess it must still be a work in progress (I don’t mean that badly).
‘Wallpapers’ and ‘Carbage’ are two sections I miss from the old site, though, and more games really is a must. What happened to the SIARPC game, or good ol’ Car Darts, for example? You could even turn that into an iPhone app (though I don’t necessarily expect this to happen).
Personally, I thought the blogs were divided very well. I knew where everything was. And it’s not exactly like “New Car News” does many/any serious industry debating like Foreman.
If “Car News” is to replace both CupHolder and Foreman, can it be made to work like this blog, rather than being all grey and buggy? Perhaps with the option to edit posts? Maybe even go back to the original blogs, where mods picked good comments. That way there wouldn’t be so much irritating spam, “First!!1!” posts and one-word comments on every page…
There were originally going to be more blogs, like “Horsepower”. That could take over the F1 blog and be an all-sport blog instead. You could use it to cover main ones like F1 (duh), WRC and BTCC, plus look at less covered sports like CORR, or GT3 (which TG mag did a feature on in March), or the Japanese “SUPER GT” that I plan on following in 2010. Or make full-blown TG Forums, but that might take a lot of doing.
Sorry for the long post, I kept thinking as I was typing…
i think taht you should keep the separate blogs i find it easiest to navigate through it and also i have a question whatever happened to the planned blogs named horsepower and another 1 or 2 when you released the sit i seem to remember horsepower was going to have information and things that the tg presenters jezza hamster and old man actually put on the interweb!
Kuang and Mikeado +1
I can see why Foreman has been merged with Car News, but any Cupholderish posts would seem out of place there (like the one with the overpowered kart drifting). Maybe you can still split the car news in two: one for ’serious’ news and the other for assorted rubbish and tomfoolery. That way people looking for a short diversion can get straight to it without needing to browse through not-so-funny concept cars or new Dacias.
I also don’t like how you’re not able to make paragraphs in the news comment section, that really needs to be fixed to promote legibility. Maybe add a button for italics as well? Not all of us know html…
And whatever happened to the other motorsport blogs that were announced? Instead of an F1-exclusive blog, it would be nice to see WRC, touring car, MotoGP, etc. in there as well.
Oh, and I noticed I’m not the only one missing wallpapers.
I always find Kuang and Mikeado’s comments good and agree with them here too. I think cupholder stuff would get a bit lost in the news section and it’s not really news, maybe you could have a section called Carbage and have the old carbage pics, the cupholder videos and other posts on tat and funny stuff. I think there’s much more to motorsport than F1 so the proposed blogs of “Fast and Dangerous” or “Horsepower” would be good to encompass all of it.
One point on the News section is that if you have an RSS feed you have to keep going back to it because you can’t jump to the next post as you can in the blogs. Also the comment system is a bit rubbish and you can’t fit longer names in but you can here! A bit frustrating that they are not the same system!
I think you should have kept them all apart from each other. I always thought that the Cupholder and Foreman were different, with the Cupholder being the “mucking about with cars” blog and the Foreman being the more sensible one. And no more Transmission? Why can’t that one – at least – survive!
More serious car stuff, more from the presenters and more web exclusives, but keep the design similar – very unique. Is there going to be a revamp for the magazine too?! Hope so.
Im not sure about this. Since TopGear.com was re-launched in October TG.com has had incredibly more visitors and was much more simple to navigate around than the old site. All you had to do to find car reviews was highlight ‘Cars’ then underneath you’d see ‘Car reviews’, simples. But now you’ve seemed to have complicated it slightly.
I like the fact that the F1 and telly show blogs are now under ‘News’ but surely the Foreman blog should be under news too? It does give you some great car news and related news with no ‘mucking about’ involved. So why not put the Foreman blog under ‘News’ and the Transmission blog under ‘TV show’ instead? It makes much more sense in my mind.
Also how about making that ‘Horsepower’ blog that was strangely forgotten. But where would you put it? I suppose you could put the Horsepower and Cupholder blogs under a ‘mucking about’ section under ‘cars’, although some people might think that’s still slightly complicated.
Also how about having videos of motorsport events under ‘videos’? You could split the video section into two parts with ‘TG Stuff’ being one and ‘Motorsport Stuff’ being the other. This would save me and many other Motorsport fans having to search through youtube for way too long to eventually find a crappy little 15 second video of one car going round a hairpin.
Your opinions would be greatly appreciated by the way TG.
By the way the Horsepower blog was the one where the presenters would post the blogs. Im sure that everyone here would like the Horsepower blog to appear on the website.
Stig’s Irish Cousin: I like your idea on having a blog on other motorsports rather than just F1. So how about one blog with the subject of motorsport in general rather than just a blog on F1? As you said there’s more to motorsport than F1.
I was hoping we’d get a review of an actual cup holder.
I think everyone would want a sub section of carbage under the car news tab. That stuff was gold dust, want to see more new modified tat. I might even give you some of it myself
Secondly keep up the youtube crash bang wallop stuff, thats brilliant too
Put it back the way it was. There is no easy way of getting to old articles with the way it is now.
Please please please.
Change simply for the sake of change is rarely a good thing
sunday afternoon club does sometimes mention other motorsports, like le mans…
great idea. oh and btw vie u r disguting
Just blow more shit up.
I’m with Kuang and Mikeado
Cupholder – good for a quick fix of TG by putting a smile on my face
News – quick click, quick read, job done
Foreman – serious thought from the writers, (usually) serious thought from the contributors
Cheers
Sorry, would’ve responded earlier but I’ve just been in fits watching the new outtakes
It’ll be interesting to see how the new changes work, and if the new structure changes the way the writers select articles. I’m sure that the changes have come about as a result of some consideration, so the best approach might be to trust the web team’s judgment and see how it all goes.
Could I suggest a minor compromise to keep the existing army of Cupholder fans happy? The section is incorporated into something bigger, but we still have the tagging mechanism to play with. Would it be possible to tag suitable articles with ‘cupholder’ as a nod to the original section, and also to allow the fans to view an aggregate of all related articles with a single click?
Oh, and thanks for the pleasant comments, I try my best
Think of me as the opposite of a typical Youtube commenter 
I’m with kuang and think cupholder should stay seperate.
Also the i think the “horsepower” blog faturing news on motorsports other than F1 that was originally planned should be created.
I agree with Torch(USA) about not finding old articles – it took me quite a while even to find this now it’s off the main page! I’m sure it’s only temporary whilst the Interweb Elves do their thing.
In regards to The Future of CupHolder (sounds like the name of a Simpsons or Family Guy episode), it could go under “Cars” rather than “News”, as a fourth sub-section, either called CupHolder or “Mad Stuff” or something. Because it’s not really ‘news’ is it?
I also just remembered the “Make Your Own Cool Wall” feature from the ol’ site. As long as you regularly/occasionally add to the list of cars, that would be a hugely popular feature (everyone loves the Cool Wall), as it was previously also.
There’s some really good suggestions in these comments, I especially like the idea of looking at real- and future-classics, perhaps stuff like comparing the TTRS to the Sport Quattro, or the 911 Sport Classic to a proper RS Ducktail, or looking for used gems in one’s spare time – I just hope the team can still find this page!!
Like Mikeado it also took me a bit of time to find this blog. I had to search for it which i never had to do before, but today i did. I just used to click ‘Blogs’ and then i was there. I don’t see why you have to change it this much anyway. Before the update the site was incredibly simple as it only took one click or so to find what you wanted. But now it takes too many clicks and you can’t even find this blog using the link menu anymore.
I also remember the ‘Make Your Own Cool Wall’ feature and i found it quite good. So what’s wrong with having a ‘Blogs’ link to keep things simple but have a ‘Mucking About’ section for wallpapers, carbage and other random car-related stuff. I agree with Mikeado on this one.
Oh and @ Kuang: ‘Think of me as the opposite of a typical Youtube commenter’. I’m loving that statement!
And i agree that Cupholder doesn’t really fit in the news section one bit. Cupholder’s more of a ‘Mucking about’ blog, a bit like the opposite of Foreman which is serious, Cupholder isn’t serious at all. It’s like the funny and stupid side of motoring, that’s probably why it’s so popular!
BOOOOOO!!!!!! Cupholder rules, bring it back!
I’m gonna pitch for a return to the old format too,figers crossed for that to happen…
Ok, now the only way to even access cupholder is to use the little search thing in the top corner.
This is fairly ridiculous.
Changes like these are supposed to make it easier not harder to find things.
i luved cupholder
I agree with Mikeado and Kuang, this is my fav site and squezzing more stuff into one catergory wikll make it a bit too much for one blog. Most of us miss the wallpaper section because the pictures wore amazing and personaly I miss the cool wall section that was on the old site (the one when you made your own cool wall.) a nother thing I would suggest is a special sections for youtube videos and stuff like that and try to do something about the comments on the news section because some times the comment gos in twice in stead of once. Hope I helped
Bring back Cup Holder!
It’s good to have things other than just news.
b
I’m having difficulty in viewing most of the videos posted on your site. I’m in the U.S. and it says something like “this video cannot be viewed from you country/location”. Is there some sort of internet block? Is it a question of compatibility? I find it hard to believe that the BBC is using a video format that isn’t viewable in the U.S. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
One HUGE Top Gear Fan,
Please can you have more games???!
otterbear i live in the u.s to and the same thing happens