While the past few weeks of the Olympics have been incredibly special, the work doesn't let up for BBC Sport. Alongside the huge network TV viewing figures we have seen unprecedented audience numbers for our digital services - and the challenge now is how we build on what we have seen in London for our week-in, week-out online sports coverage.

Big sporting events have traditionally been the catalyst for change in broadcasting - from the advent of colour TV to the introduction of HD - and I'd like to think what we have seen during London 2012 will have a bearing on how sport is covered in the future.

• Enhancing our mobile offering, including the introduction of a BBC Sport app for smartphones;
• Taking some time to develop online video for live sport, following the success of London 2012; and
• Building a genuine, effective 'connected TV' service - ultimately to replace the red button, which has served us well in the past, but which is due to be scaled back in the coming months - and learning the lessons from the special 24 channels we had during the Olympics.

When we began our digital Olympics project, back in 2005 after London won the right to stage the Games, we came up with a phrase to describe our ambition. We wanted the 2012 Olympics to do for digital media what the Coronation had done for TV. In other words, to be the moment when it moved from the preserve of 'early adopters' (I'm not sure they were called that back in 1953) into the mainstream.

The reason we felt optimistic was down to the timing. From a digital perspective we were lucky that the BBC got to broadcast a home Olympics in 2012. If the Games had come to the UK in 2008 it would have been slightly too early, the technology and audience behaviour wasn't quite ready back then. Similarly if it had been in 2016, the moment would probably have passed. As it was, 2012 felt perfect: it was when the UK was due to switch off analogue TV and move to a fully digital landscape. It looked like being the 'sweet-spot' where technology and audience uptake were set to converge.

Much has changed in the intervening seven years, of course. Back in 2005 there were no tablets. Mobiles, for the vast majority of people, were just for making calls and texting. Only around half of UK households had digital TV. Social media was in its infancy - Facebook was only starting to pick up momentum; Twitter didn't even exist.

By 2012 viewers were ready for a new type of sports coverage - and, crucially, more of us have the kit and access to the signal we needed to enjoy the full Olympic experience.

That comparison with the Coronation has served as useful journalistic shorthand: a reminder to all of us at the BBC that public broadcasters have a duty to deliver big national events on behalf of the whole population. It's too early of course to tell whether we have witnessed something as seismic as the original surge in TV viewing back in 1953. But it does feel that we have seen significant change over the past few weeks.

London 2012 has proved to be a spur for a new type of media consumption: fully connected at all times, on-demand and on-the-go. The statistics are pretty bold, with 39 million UK browsers of BBC Sport, around a third of whom were accessing us on mobile devices.

But the anecdotal evidence is just as powerful. I have heard tales of TV viewers in their 90s using the Red Button for the first time, such was the pull of the sport on offer. I watched in amazement as a whole carriage on a train crowded round three different mobile screens to see Usain Bolt win his 200m gold. And you are reminded that this is now part of the national conversation when even the fabled front page of Private Eye is referencing the Red Button, This then genuinely did feel mainstream.

The key mission for our coverage was that you would 'never miss a moment' - built around offering every sport as it happened; a total of 2,500 hours of video in up to 24 different video streams at any one time. Across the 17 days of the Games, some 24m viewers watched at least 15 minutes of our Red Button service - and what was particularly gratifying is that all the different sports proved to be a draw for the audience, with each of those 24 'channels' receiving at least 100,000 viewers at some point.

Here are the peak audiences for each of the top 20 sports on Red Button (excluding Freeview numbers):

Beyond the phenomenal surge in multi-event viewing there have been other developments in sports coverage that we're tracking.

We are continuing to see the rise of live blogging or, as we prefer to call it at BBC Sport, live text commentary. These pages were the most popular on our London 2012 site - the classic one-stop shop where our journalists could capture all the stories from the panoply of Olympic sports. Essentially they represent a new form of story-telling: dynamic, bite-sized and interactive, with audience comments at the heart of them. They are the bedrock of our coverage of football, cricket and other big sports and we are always looking to take them to another level.

Then there is social media. This was the Olympics where Twitter made a huge impact.

As well as being the place where Olympians interacted with their armies of fans, Twitter has established itself, in pretty short order, as a key element of the journalist's armoury. We use it as an additional way for our reporters to get news and comment out there quickly - and to monitor stories from elsewhere.

BBC Sport used Twitter extensively during the Games, from taking photos of police officers mimicking Usain Bolt's trademark pose to sparking 4,000 retweets from Dutch fans after we linked their thrashing of Team GB's hockey team to their earlier dressage defeat.

But my personal favourite tweet during London 2012 was from our chief sports writer, Tom Fordyce. In seven words it summed up the sheer disbelief that many of us felt at what we were seeing from Team GB - plus that peculiar ability of sports fans to switch from despondency to arrogance at the flick of a switch. It read simply:

'World: can we play you every week?'

• Formatting of results and fixtures - we know there has been some frustration with the way our pages that display up-coming football matches are laid out. In particular there have been calls to still see all the fixtures in all divisions on any given day. We're sorry this facility isn't currently available - but I want to assure you we are working to bring it back as a priority. I can't yet say when the issue will be resolved, as it represents a significant technical deployment - but it is being looked at.
• Reflecting the BBC sport brand - as I have mentioned before, yellow and black are the colours of BBC Sport's on-air brand, so it is appropriate that they are represented on the website. However, in response to some of your feedback, we are considering potentially reducing the usage of yellow on particular pages.
• Headlines on the homepage - our new-look Sport homepage is designed to showcase a whole host of different types of content, everything from video and audio to scores and league tables. We know that many of you just want to scan the headlines of the big sports stories of the day - and that is one of the reasons we have introduced a new flexible, image-heavy section at the top of the homepage, which allows us to highlight the main stories and events. But we will keep looking at the most effective way to balance the top stories and allow headline scanning - and we will test any potential further changes before introducing them onto the live site.
• Videprinter - we know some of you are missing the videprinter, ie the single page containing all the latest scores as they come in, across all football divisions. We are investigating ways we can bring this service back, while still retaining the separate divisional live scores pages which we know many others prefer to use. In the meantime, the 'old videprinter' can be found here and will remain available until 'videprinter mkII' is launched.

So that's a list of some of the priority areas of focus for us. It's not exhaustive and I realise I haven't provided full detail on exactly what we plan to do.

But I will stress what I said in my original blog post about this relaunch - which is that we will not be making knee-jerk changes. We have already implemented immediate fixes to mend 'broken' elements on the site (including the 'flashing' banner and video which automatically played on certain pages) but other changes need more consideration and testing, and our software developers require time and space to put them into place.

Even though there may be no instant changes to announce right now, that does not mean we are ignoring any issues that you have raised. We will come back to this blog to let you know as and when we have more specific news to announce.

These became apparent over the weekend and continue to affect our live text pages.

We are hard at work to resolve this, please bear with us while we do so.

In the meantime, Sportsday Live is being published via a page which requires users to hit 'refresh' for updates.

We will revert to our new-look dynamic pages across the site as soon as the technical problems have been resolved.

Thank you for your patience.

First of all it is worth remembering that one of the main reasons for the relaunch was to make the site more dynamic, so that we can better respond to the big stories and events. Yesterday we saw that theory put into practice, initially with Harry Redknapp's acquittal, then later in the day with Fabio Capello's resignation as England manager.

For a sports website, this was the ultimate day for breaking news and our relaunched site - with its front page layout designed to create more of an impact and a live page that pulls in material from across BBC outlets and the best of our audience interaction - responded in kind. On our old site it was difficult to do stories like this justice - now we have the tools to better capture and reflect the latest news as it happens.

Secondly, I would like to simply reiterate what we said last week when we went live - that this is an on-going process of development. Last Wednesday wasn't the end of the process, it was the start. There is more to come as we continue to enhance our online product in the run-up to a huge summer of sport.

Many of you have you have taken the time to tell us what you think about the redesign via our posts on the BBC Sport Editors' blog and on the BBC internet blog.

We have read all the comments, as well as feedback from a variety of other sources, and have identified key areas that we are looking to address.

It's fair to say that the colour scheme of the site has been a significant topic of discussion.

The first thing to say is that yellow and black have been BBC Sport's brand colours for a number of years now. The previous version of the website featured yellow and black - albeit to a lesser extent, partly because different sports contained different colours in their banners.

We are committed to retaining this overall BBC Sport branding, which provides a strong sense of identity. However, we are also looking at some design tweaks to our web pages that we hope will help those of you who have raised the issue of the colour - as outlined by Cait O'Riordan in her blog post.

Cait also explains more about the Olympics pages we have launched this week. If you head to bbc.co.uk/olympics you will now see a secondary navigation bar at the top of the page. From there you can explore athlete and country pages; not all of them have much content on yet but they are a foundation to build on between now and the Olympics.

We expect the Team GB page, to be popular, with its box comparing Team GB with other major Olympic nations.

This is one example of the new features we will launch during the increasingly busy countdown to the Games and there will be more on that as we go.

But I wanted to pick up in more detail on some of the themes from last week's relaunch.

Video
- Many of you told us you did not like the way video automatically plays when you enter our new-look live pages. This was unintended and related to how we implemented the page templates used by other parts of the BBC, and as such we will be changing that in the near future.

- Some of you were also frustrated about the fact we have not been able to make video play on some smart phones and tablets. We are working on this and are committed to a solution for the Olympics. The reason we are able to do this for video content on other BBC sites (eg News) is because rights management tends to be much more straightforward in those areas. In Sport we have complex rights agreements which are usually sold on a territory-by-territory basis. This means we generally have to prevent video from playing outside the UK. But as I said, we are focusing on sorting this issue.

Football fixtures/results/tables
- Lots of you have told us how you like some of the new functionality of these pages - such as the new live scores page which kicks in during a busy weekend or evening of football, and the form-guide graph dropdowns on our tables.

But many of you have also told us you do not like some of the changes - eg inability to look at football fixtures/results by day and the lack of ability to see goals go in across various leagues (aka the 'videprinter').

So we will be reviewing these pages with the aim of making it easier for our audience to find these elements.

- Some of you have told us you are disappointed we are no longer displaying the European fixtures/results/tables. I need to stress that we haven't taken these pages down. However because of the way we have changed our navigation, the route there is slightly different.

Instead of these pages being displayed in the Leagues and Competitions navigation on the right-hand end of the football menu, they are found within the left-hand links to Results, Fixtures & Tables.

This is the same for those of you looking for statistics on the Blue Square North and South leagues.

Broken links We know there were several instances of broken links - we are working our way through all these and fixing them.

We are also now fixing the problem which affected the links to Sport content on the BBC mobile homepage.

Cricket scorecard Many of you were frustrated that the dynamic scorecard module within our live cricket pages was not auto-updating. We are working on a fix for this and hope to have it in place very soon.

There are other little glitches we are continuing to work through (thanks for those who have reported them - we cannot always reply, but we do take on board what you say). We appreciate your patience for bearing with us while we continue to iron out problems and refine the pages.

As I said in the last post, we are listening to all your comments and while we will not be rushing into changes, we will continue to evolve based on all our audience research including what you tell us via our various forms of feedback.

This entry is now closed to comments. Ben has written a new blog responding to some of the initial feedback. It can be found here.

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UPDATE: FRIDAY 3 FEB, 1722 GMT.
Posting this as a re-comment but also adding here to highlight to new visitors to the blog-

I just want to reassure all commenters, that we are listening to all feedback - from a number of sources not just this blog - and will be collating and assessing to help us inform the decisions we take on how best to fine tune the new-look site.

Far from ignoring feedback, we are reading every comment posted on this blog, and in Cait O Riordan's blog, and really value your feedback, either here or via the survey linked in the original post.

There are some very clear themes that have come through which we will be investigating further - some of the obvious ones being our yellow banners, journeys to football statistics and the formatting of the stats themselves.

Those comments which highlight specific user issues are particularly useful - as I said we are taking in all your comments and assessing but we cannot respond individually to them all.

For those asking about testing, we conducted user testing and other research, for example a survey of 2,000 people, at various stages of the project and will continue to thoroughly test any planned changes before pushing them to live, so hope you can appreciate we won't be making any rushed decisions as the new site beds in and we take a sensible period of time to gauge things properly.

Thanks, Claire

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You will notice that we have begun the process of relaunching the BBC Sport website. Today, February 1 2012, marks the start of a significant piece of work that will see us completely overhaul our online service - the first time we have done so since 2003.

The timing, of course, is no coincidence. We are making these changes to put us in the best shape for one of the busiest years of sport in the BBC's history, which will culminate in the London Olympics, our biggest event yet.

The changes are in response to audience feedback and research. Clearly a huge amount has happened on the internet since that last re-launch in 2003. Our audience has grown significantly over the years, but the website had not been updated in corresponding fashion.

The changes we are implementing now are significant and go beyond a mere 'lick of paint' - they are designed to give us the tools we need to provide more effective coverage of sport and to get people to the content they want.

New-look homepage

So what is changing? In headlines terms we are introducing:

• A new navigation
• An updated look and feel
• Wider pages
• More prominence for live coverage
• Better connections to the rest of the web.

But before I get into some of the detail around the redesign, it's worth stressing that today is only the start of this process: we have changed the Sport homepage and some of the sections that command the most traffic, but there is a significant amount of technical work involved and it will take time to change all of the site to the new look.

My colleague in BBC Future Media Cait O'Riordan has written more on those technical aspects of the project.

So, with the Olympics approaching, we will also be bringing in new sections and content to boost our coverage of the London Games - hot on the heels of the newly-revamped BBC 2012 site. Meanwhile, away from the main website, we will also be making significant improvements to BBC Sport's mobile and connected TV services - so keep an eye out for those developments in the months ahead.

In terms of some of the specific changes to the website, here is more detail on a few of them, which hopefully explains what we are doing and why we are doing it...

1. Navigation

Let's start with the navigation - this is one of the most obvious differences with the new site, which involves switching from a vertical to a horizontal list of sports.

This is in line with the rest of BBC Online - and indeed with virtually all other major sports websites. By doing this we are simply giving ourselves more space to work with on the page - a more expansive canvas, if you will, for us to use for our coverage.

It means we can be more visual and can give more prominence to video, which (as the continued growth of BBC iPlayer shows) is an increasingly important element of the web output for a broadcaster like us.

The previous site had a long list of sports on the left-hand side of the Sport homepage. But crucially that was the only page that did so.

With more and more people bypassing that front page and coming straight to specific pages deep within the site (via search engines, links from social networks and other recommendations from friends) we needed a way to guide them around the rest of what we have to offer.

So the solution is a horizontal navigational bar. The key thing to note here is that, once the redesign is complete, for the first time there will be a link to every sport section at the top of every page on the Sport website.

Our audience research and user testing indicated we needed to keep this horizontal list of sports concise - the longer it is the more confusing it can be.

Our list of sports is based on those areas of our website that generate the most content and which drive the bulk of our day-to-day traffic: so football, Formula 1, cricket, rugby (union and league), tennis and golf; along with our editorial priority for 2012, the London Olympics; plus a link to 'more sports'.

It is worth stressing the purpose of this section of bbc.co.uk/sport: it is not a promotional area, it is a way of navigating around the website. It is not designed as a hierarchy; it is a tool to allow people to find the content they want. All sections of the site are now contained within one single strip. So you should be able to find the right sport wherever you are on the site.

The 'promotion' of sports will happen elsewhere on the site - particularly on the BBC Sport homepage, which, with its new lay-out will allow us to properly showcase key events, stories and features from across an array of sports.

2. Live sport

When we started covering sport on the BBC website - first for the football World Cup in 1998 and then with a specific sports site in 2000 - our coverage was based around news 'stories'. The look and feel of the site reflected this focus on self-contained text stories, each with a beginning, a middle and an end, and in this respect we were just the same as the site from which we had grown, BBC News.

However, the internet has transformed the way sport is covered. The dynamism of the web, its multimedia nature, its connectivity and its portability have all demanded a different form of output. Technology and user behaviour have moved on massively since the early days of sports websites, which back then were little more than 'electronic newspapers'.

Live sport these days is covered in video, in audio; with text commentaries, live scores and rich data; through social networking and interaction. Our website, which generates its biggest spikes in traffic around the live events, frankly needed to be transformed to allow us to keep up with the needs of our audience and our ambitions for our coverage.

So the new-look site has live coverage at its heart:

• We have enhanced our scores and tables, making more of the rich data available to us;
• There are modules for live scores and stats on the homepage and each sports index;
• Our live event pages, which bring video and audio, audience interaction and text commentary together in one place, have been updated
• The new colour palette offers signposting for live content, with the use of blue labelling to highlight appropriate links

3. Other changes

Among some of the additional changes we are making are:
• New ways to better promote sport from the UK's Nations and Regions, including headline feeds and an area for radio commentaries on our homepage.
• A brand new section for England Sport, to complement our existing services for Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales, which will capture the best of the distinctive output being produced by the BBC's network of local radio teams.
• And we are also launching new content for the website - including regular columns from former England captain Alec Stewart on cricket and middle-distance great Steve Cram on the Olympics ahead of London 2012. There will be more new features and columns to come as our big year of sport progresses.

The changing face of BBC Sport

This is not the first time we have gone through significant change - and tellingly, we have tended to update ourselves around the Olympic cycle. If you're interested, here's how BBC Sport online has developed over the years:

Our first website looked like this in 2000 - a new site for a new millennium and, as now, a major Olympic year.

Then in 2003 we changed again to become less like a long linear list of stories, ensuring we were well set for the Athens Games in 2004.

Another Olympics, Beijing, was the catalyst for further change in 2008 - when we responded to the rise in high-speed broadband connections and the growth of sites like YouTube to offer embedded video on wider pages.

So that's how the website has changed over the years.

And here's a sense of how the audience has grown during the same period - to the extent that we now have around 11.5 million people in the UK using the BBC Sport website every week, with another 4.5 million coming from overseas.

Over that time the website has established itself as one of the central elements of BBC Sport's coverage, along with our TV and radio services. But it cannot stay still.

It is a truism to say that the web will keep changing: innovation is its lifeblood. Or, as the renowned digital commentator John Naughton recently put it, for the internet "disruption is a feature, not a bug".

We have to embrace change - but we need to do so in a considered way: by listening to our users; by researching and analysing; and by using our editorial, design and technical expertise to make the best decisions we can.

That is how we embarked on this project many months ago - and it is how we will approach the next stage too.

The work is far from complete: we will review what we have done so far and make further changes if necessary, once we have had a chance to assess how the redesign is going. But we will take our time and will not be making knee-jerk reactions.

In that spirit we look forward to receiving your feedback on what we have done so far.

You can of course post your comments and questions here and you can also send your feedback - good and bad - via our internet survey.

And we have a page of Frequently Asked Questions which may also answer some of the queries you may have.

We're still working things through and are not in a position to confirm everything yet - but we are able to reveal some of the headlines: including which races we will be covering live; and how we intend to broadcast highlights of the rest.

The first thing to stress is that we will be at every race, bringing the season to life for BBC TV viewers.

Jake Humphrey will be leading our coverage from the F1 paddock, as he has for the past three seasons, and he'll have 13-time race winner David Coulthard alongside him, while Lee McKenzie will be back in place as pit-lane reporter.

You may have heard Martin Brundle is leaving - and we wish him well. We will be announcing the rest of our on-air team in the coming weeks.

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In terms of coverage, we'll have 10 of the races live, which are: China (15 April), Spain (3 May), Monaco (27 May), Europe (24 June), Britain (8 July), Belgium (2 September), Singapore (23 September), Korea (14 October), Abu Dhabi (4 November), Brazil (25 November).

For the other races we will run extended highlights a few hours after the chequered flag.

The plan is that races in the Far East time zone, which take place early in the morning in the UK, will be run as a two-hour show at 2pm.

And for highlights of European GPs we're looking to run 90-minute programmes, going out at 5.30pm. You can see more details about our broadcast plans here.

A word on the race split. Just to be clear, it wasn't the case that the BBC was simply able to select its preferred 10 races to cover live - under the terms of our rights agreement, the allocation was decided through a negotiation with Sky, with each broadcaster able to prioritise specific choices within certain parameters.

One of our key criteria was to try to avoid too many major clashes with other big sporting events we are covering, particularly the London Olympics next summer.

The way the calendar works after the Olympics, the rest of the season on the BBC will effectively alternate between live and highlights races, so there is something of a pattern that viewers can follow.

While we would obviously prefer to have all the races live, we still have significant airtime over the course of grand prix weekends to devote to F1.

We'll have to work harder to let you know when we're on air, but we remain ambitious for our coverage: we aim to provide entertaining, expert programming that appeals to the broadest possible audience.

I won't dwell on the reasons for the BBC doing the deal we have on the rights - that was debated and discussed when the news was announced back in the summer - other than to reiterate the point that the BBC as a whole is facing considerable cut-backs.

We've had to face some tough choices and we recognise that some people have strong views about the F1 deal.

But now things have begun to settle down, we are looking forward to next season and the creative challenge of telling the story of the 2012 F1 season in a new way for BBC TV audiences.

We'll keep you updated as our plans progress over the winter.

There has been considerable reaction to the news so I feel it's important to explain some of the background behind what has happened.

The headline is that under a seven-year deal starting next season, we will be showing 10 of the races in the F1 calendar, plus the corresponding qualifying and practice sessions, live on BBC TV.

We will broadcast extended highlights for the rest of the grands prix just a few hours after the chequered flag has been waved. Sky will have live action from all races, qualifying and practice sessions.

There has been a great deal of unsettling speculation recently about F1 rights. Amid all the rumour and counter-rumour, our production and on-air team have shown huge professionalism, dedication and expertise to keep delivering the high quality output that has become the trademark of our coverage.

So why are we sharing the coverage with Sky when up to now it had just been us?

Ultimately, of course, decisions about which media organisations get the chance to broadcast F1 are taken by Bernie Ecclestone's Formula 1 Management (FOM). But from the BBC's perspective the new set-up provided us with an opportunity to continue our association with this gripping sport, which has captured the imagination of our audiences since it returned to BBC screens in 2009, with viewing figures at a 10-year high this season.

And while our coverage from 2012 may not be as extensive as it has been up to now, the bare facts are that the BBC needs to save money. Given the financial circumstances in which we find ourselves, we believe this new deal offers the best outcome for licence-fee payers.

In a sense this partnership with Sky is another example of how the landscape of sports broadcasting has been transformed in recent years. There was a time when the BBC and other public service broadcasters could expect to televise all the big sports themselves. Now though we have a 'mixed economy', with some events on satellite while others are on terrestrial.

And although this may be the first time the BBC has shared Formula 1 with another broadcaster, there is a long-standing pattern of partnerships between free-to-air and pay TV to cover major sports. So the Champions League can be watched on both Sky and ITV; US Masters golf is now shared between ourselves and Sky (with audiences for that event up this year); and then of course there is the Premier League - with live games on Sky and ESPN, while our ever-popular highlights programme Match of the Day keeps football fans entertained on a Saturday night.

This new F1 arrangement will allow us to tell the story of the whole F1 season for BBC viewers, while providing extended access to the biggest moments in the calendar: including the glamour of Monaco, the excitement of the last race of the season, plus the British grand prix at Silverstone, which remains one of the highlights of the UK's sporting summer.

In addition to our award-winning TV output, we will continue with our exclusive radio coverage on 5 Live and 5 Live Sports Extra as well as our comprehensive F1 website and mobile services and the regular broadcasts on BBC News outlets. We know F1 fans appreciate the extensive multi-platform coverage we offer and, as well as capturing those big moments on TV, we pledge to keep audiences up to date with all the news and action throughout the season, wherever they are.

You will appreciate these are early days, with much still to decide, including some of the detail around our own production. We will let you know as soon as there is more to say on that front - but in the meantime there is the small matter of the 2011 season to focus on.

Ben Gallop is the BBC's Head of F1

The 606 radio show continues, of course, as one of the lynchpins of the 5 Live schedule and the long-established home of grown-up football debate. But its online counterpart has come to an end.

I explained in my original blog post back in January why we had taken this decision. The headline is that the BBC as a whole is cutting costs and is taking a more streamlined approach to its online offering. For us at BBC Sport this means we are focusing on the priority areas of our website: the latest news across a whole range of sports and live coverage of the biggest events.

In many ways 606 belongs to an earlier era of the web. Technology and user behaviour have been transformed in the years since it was launched in 2003. As I have mentioned before, it is worth remembering that this was back in the days before the likes of Facebook and Twitter came along to change not only the internet but, some would argue, create whole new forms of social interaction.

I know many people still use 606 and enjoy the banter and the chance to exchange views with fellow fans on the sporting issues of the day. And it is worth stressing that all of us at BBC Sport Online are proud that 606 established itself as such a popular forum for debate. But we have had to accept that things move on and, with user numbers declining for a number of years now (the audience has halved since 2008), the end of the 2010-11 football season feels like an appropriate time to bring things to a close.

On our own site, we want our audience's views to become a more integral part of the main BBC Sport website rather than on a separate 'mini site'. In the coming months we will be introducing new ways for fans to discuss the biggest sports news stories and give their views on the major events on the main pages of BBC Sport Online rather than taking place over at 606.

But we also recognise that there are so many other places on the internet for fans to take part in sporting debates - this clearly isn't a preserve of the BBC. In fact I'm sure many of you will take the chance to comment below giving examples of other websites that have developed thriving communities of sports fans.

It only remains for me to thank everyone who has taken part in 606 discussions over the years. It's been a website that was always dependent on the creativity and dedication of its users - and we owed it all to you.

I just wanted to spend a bit of time explaining what this means for the Sport website.

Cuts will mean a change to what we offer. However, I believe we have put together a strategy that will ensure BBC Sport can continue to deliver you a first-class service.

From our research and our conversations with you we have found that the two elements of BBC Sport Online that are most important are:

• Fast, reliable and in-depth news across a range of sports;
• Dynamic coverage of the best live sports events.

So those are the areas we will be focusing on. We want to continue to enhance our sports journalism and to innovate around our event coverage - this is in line with the principles of the wider BBC strategy. And we want to link out more and act as a trusted guide to relevant sports content on other websites.

The flip-side of this, of course, is that we won't be able to do everything else we currently do - and there are some key areas of the web operation that will be scaled back:

• The 606 website will close at the end of the current football season - instead the focus for audience interactivity will be on capturing the conversation around the biggest sports stories and events. It is worth stressing that the 606 radio show on 5 Live will continue - and we are considering ways for the audience to interact with 606 on the 5 Live website, focused around the radio programme;
• The on-demand sports news video bulletin will go - video is a central part of our site, but we know the bulk of traffic goes to on-demand clips around stories and streams of live events. So that's where we will focus our efforts, rather than on a 'linear' bulletin of headlines;
• The Sport Academy website will close - coverage of participation in sports will instead be incorporated within the individual sections of the Sport site;
• There will be less coverage of those sports and events that fall outside our main editorial priorities. This does not mean we will stop covering them altogether, it's more a question of "turning down the volume" of what we do outside the biggest stories;
• And in general we will continue the move to increasingly focus on core coverage of sports journalism and events - a process that has already begun with the closure of the Fun & Games section of the site last summer.

Obviously this announcement represents significant changes for the BBC Sport website - as you would expect, given that the whole of BBC Online is losing 25% of its budget. And we don't under-estimate the impact that they will have on some of our audience.

These have been difficult decisions and we're genuinely sorry we have had to scale back or even close some areas of our website that have built up a loyal following over the years. We have had to prioritise on those areas of our service that are of most value to our audience and which are consistent with the BBC's wider aims and objectives.

In particular the decision to close the 606 discussion website warrants more explanation.

The main reason why all these changes are being made to BBC Online is a financial one - the overall budget is being reduced so we need to cut our cloth accordingly. Instead of moderating and maintaining a site as large as 606, we can concentrate on our editorial priorities.

Alongside the overall online budget cuts, there are other strategic reasons for choosing this course of action. The fact is that technology and audience behaviour has moved on massively since we first launched the 606 site back in 2003. In those days there was no Facebook or Twitter and the 606 messageboards swiftly established a reputation as a place to come to discuss all kinds of issues in sport with fellow fans.

But things move on. The social media landscape has been transformed in recent years (as this handy map attempts to illustrate). And the emergence of new giants on this scene - each with that crucial commodity, critical audience mass - has seen 606's popularity fall from a peak of 1.1m unique users a week back in 2008 to around half that figure now.

When it comes to people who actually comment on the site, we have seen a similar trend. 606 now has around 15,000 'active users' a week - half the number the site was attracting in 2008.

By way of contrast, the audience for the main BBC Sport website has expanded steadily in the same period, from 9m users a week in 2008 to 12.5m now.

So in essence the Sport site has seen 33% growth over the past two-and-a-half years, while 606 has experienced a 50% fall.

These bare facts may be indicative of a downward trend - but there is still a significant audience for 606 and we know from feedback that there are users of the site who do appreciate it and feel connected to communities there. The fact is though that there are other messageboards, whether connected to specific sports or individual clubs, which offer this kind of debating platform for fans.

To be clear, we still want our users to comment on the big sports stories of the day, to get involved in debates on our blogs and to use the likes of Twitter to play an active part in our live text commentaries. And, of course, 606 the radio show will continue to provide the perfect platform for fans to have their say on the latest football action.

The changes we are announcing today will start to take effect in the spring, with the 606 website closing at the end of the football season.

For more context on the BBC's overall strategy for social media please visit my colleague Ian Hunter's blog. And you can of course have your say on the 606 announcement over on the 606 website.

France had just won Euro 2000, beating Italy in the climax to one of the great international football competitions. At Wimbledon we were witnessing the end of one era and the start of another, with Pete Sampras on his way to his seventh and final title, while Venus Williams was about to win her first.

I remember where I was on 3 July 2000 - holed up in a ramshackle, pre-fabricated adjunct to Television Centre (ah, the glamour of the media industry...) helping to put the finishing touches to the pages that would make up the first incarnation of the BBC Sport website.

This website launched exactly a decade ago, the day after Euro 2000 finished. So I hope you'll forgive me a spot of reminiscing to sit alongside the usual future-gazing that comes with this job.

The start of the new millennium was the height of the dotcom bubble and a team of us, possibly behaving in a very un-BBC fashion, were attempting to act like a classic internet start-up. The aim was to bring editorial, design and software development skills together to exploit the new technology and provide a whole new platform for BBC Sport.

But we weren't starting from scratch. The BBC News website had already been around for a few years by that stage - and sport was one of its many sub-sections. But the plan was to provide a more comprehensive sporting offer - in effect to create a comparable 'back page' to the formidable front page that was BBC News Online.

BBC Sport's partnership with News has been one of the stand-out features since those early days. The two sites remain the most popular sections of BBC Online and we continue to share much in common - editorial content, look-and-feel and audiences.

But much has changed over that 10-year period. The Sport site soon moved on from being simply a collection of sports news stories. Live coverage of events is now just as important - from our text commentaries for Test match cricket to the rich multi-media services we can provide for big BBC showpieces like the World Cup. The spread of broadband has meant video is a significant part of the offer, while blogs like this one have switched the focus to dynamic debate.

As we look back, here are 10 facts for the first 10 years of the BBC Sport website, courtesy of my colleague 'Honest' Frank Keogh:

1. Record breakers: Nearly six million users visited the site on the day England beat Slovenia in the 2010 World Cup. Six years ago, during Euro 2004, the record at the time was two million.

2. Audio/Video: During the World Cup, the number of people accessing video or audio on the site peaked at a daily figure of 1.5m.

3. Star names: Website columnists down the years have included Rugby World Cup winner Jonny Wilkinson, Britain's top tennis player Andy Murray and England footballer Owen Hargreaves.

4. Poulter's pants: Golfer Ian Poulter sported a special pair of trousers, with an Open trophy slant, after a competition winner came up with the design for his first-round outfit.

5. 606: Since the service started where people can comment, debate or create their own articles, it has attracted more than 38m individual posts.

6. Champions: Website bloggers Tom Fordyce and Ben Dirs invented their own sporting title, the Ubogu World Championship, where people have to say the name of the former England rugby union star as many times as they can in one breath.

7. One team: Until a restructure in 2004, Ceefax and website staff wrote separate sports stories for each service. Reports for the website, digital text, Ceefax and mobile phones are now written just once.

8. Comment: More than 1,500 people commented on a blog by BBC director of Olympics Roger Mosey on the mascots for the 2012 Games.

9. Write lines: An A-level English student is doing a dissertation on Caroline Cheese's live football text commentaries.

10. Around the world: On an average day, around two-thirds of website users are from the UK, with the international audience making up the remaining 30% or so.

I suppose if you had to distil those 10 points down into one theme, it would be the old truism that the media industry is in the middle of a revolution.

And it's been a decade of technological change within sport too.

Take the story of Wimbledon since 2000. It may have a reputation for being as traditional a sporting competition as you could possibly imagine, with its pristine lawns, quaint queuing etiquette and the absence of corporate signage - but the reality is that the All England Club has managed to enhance its standing as the world's premier tennis tournament by subtly blending that tradition with some strategic modernisation. So the grass remains, but now the Centre Court has its spectacular roof to keep play going through all conditions - while the introduction of Hawkeye has removed disputes over line calls and provided an extra dose of drama for the crowds (are you watching, Herr Blatter?).

And across sport, fans now play a more active part in proceedings than they ever did before. So Formula 1 this week held its first 'fans' forum', sponsored by Fota, the teams' umbrella organisation. Spectators had the chance to grill the likes of McLaren and Ferrari and offer their own views on how to improve 'the show'. There seems a genuine willingness to engage with the public - as witnessed by Lotus boss Mike Gascoyne now providing his own version of live text commentaries on Twitter: real-time, personal updates direct from the pitwall. That kind of activity was unthinkable back in 2000.

Gascoyne is not alone in sport to have discovered the power of Twitter - Andy Murray is another prolific tweeter and you start to wonder how long it will be before someone like him is actually sending messages to their fans in between points.

So what of the next 10 years? You don't need to be a new media guru to work out that social networking, mobile browsing and emergent IPTV services like Project Canvas are likely to continue to boom and, you would imagine, provide innovative ways to both cover and consume sport. But I'd love to know where you think things are headed - or what has appealed to you most in the decade since those heady days of Euro 2000.

Who knows? Such is the cycle of sport that by 2020 France might even be quite good at football again...

My colleague Rahul Chakkara, who runs the red button platform for the BBC, has explained on his blog that High Definition is being launched on Freeview.

We know from the feedback we get that HD is increasingly popular with sports fans and this development will mean that even more viewers get to watch BBC Sport's big events in the best possible quality. Next year promises to be a big year for sport - the World Cup, Wimbledon and the Open golf will all now be broadcast in HD on Freeview.

Our approach to big sporting events like Formula 1, Wimbledon or the World Snooker Championships, has been to offer as much extra choice as possible - and on Freeview that has often meant providing two additional video streams. Similarly, during busy periods there are times when the red button allows us to broadcast more than one sport simultaneously.

The BBC's red button coverage is changing

With the arrival of HD, one of those red button streams will be going from Freeview. So unfortunately this will limit the number of choices we can offer.

There are some important points to make here:

Firstly, and crucially, it is worth stressing that this change only applies to Freeview. The other digital TV platforms, that is satellite (including Freesat), and cable - which for technical reasons have always offered more choice than Freeview on the red button - are unaffected.

Secondly, the sport that will be going from Freeview will still be available online. The BBC Sport website offers the full range of video streams that you see on satellite and cable - and the internet is an increasingly popular means for fans to follow their favourite sport. Hundreds of thousands of people now watch sport on this website every day.

Thirdly, we are looking to provide alternative ways to cover big events - including options to broadcast more sport on the BBC's linear digital channels.

BBC Sport has always tried hard to ensure that a schedule of sport coverage is available both Online, in TV listings magazines; within the Red Button service and via the Now/Next option on your on-screen electronic programme guides. This latter option will help you to find the Sport content that you are looking for and record it if your Freeview device allows it.

And finally we are working with colleagues in the BBC and beyond to develop the next generation of technologies that will help provide even more choice for viewers. The buzzword here is IPTV but in practical terms this simply means the amount of choice that is currently provided on the web would in future be available on TV as well. The aim is that the first set-top boxes with this kind of capability will be in the shops some time next year.

So, in conclusion, from October 27 the Red Button sport video on Freeview will be impacted - but despite the limitations of this platform, BBC Sport remains committed to finding other ways to bring the latest action to our audience.

The reason for these changes is that in three weeks time Formula One returns to BBC screens for the first time in 12 years.

It's a fantastic opportunity to do something different and take our coverage to new heights. There will be more to say on this in the coming days when we'll return to this blog to run through our editorial plans for the up-coming F1 season on TV, radio and online.

The main thing to point out is that we have created a new F1 section.

It fits within the overall BBC Sport website - although you may have spotted that it now has a new slot on the navigation on the left-hand side of the front page, where it sits below Football to reflect how much of a priority sport it has become for the BBC.

And if you click on the Formula One link you will see that the F1 homepage looks different. In short, it's black.

Apart from the black background, there's the countdown clock at the top of the page, the stripes of colour behind our headings, and the F1 logo at the bottom of the page: all of these are new to the BBC Sport site.

Our web designers have been working to a brief to create a new look-and-feel for F1 which would both reflect our TV coverage, while also remaining a core component of the wider website.

I think they've done a great job and have come up with an approach that takes on this key sport while at the same time keeping it rooted within the rest of our web offering. So the homepage and other elements of the F1 output will have this trademark black look, but the main content will have the normal white background.

It's worth a short word on why we've chosen to do it this way.

Our approach to the development of BBC Sport online has always been one of evolution.

The feedback we get is that the website generally works and that people can find their way around it - so we try not to suddenly switch everything around for the sake of it. But at the same time we have to avoid complacency.

The whole point about 'new media' is that it changes all the time, so we need to keep pushing the boundaries we what we do.

In essence we need to find the balance between retaining the best of the old while responding to new challenges as they come along.

The last time we did this was around a year ago when we widened the pages of the BBC Sport website and gave more prominence to our audio-video content.

It's fair to say there was a fair amount of feedback at the time on this blog. Hopefully, 12 months on, the dust has settled from that particular transformation and I am convinced the site is in a much better state than it was then.

As you'll see our new F1 website will house a number of new content features, including a blog providing an in-depth look at the sport and regular video updates from the great Murray Walker.

We'll be back here to explain more about what's on offer in due course...

Yes, I know it's not quite the same as a decent anniversary (and I'll be honest, my research merely consisted of looking at the countdown at the top of our Olympics homepage) - but 50 days to go still feels like a good enough reason to report on how our plans are progressing.

Our coverage needs to reflect the complexity of China and tell the story in the kind of impartial and independent fashion that people expect of the BBC.

My colleague Dave Gordon, who as Head of Major Events for BBC Sport runs the whole of our Beijing operation, knows more about this than most, having covered the Olympics for 30 years - and he believes the 2008 Games are the most challenging he has worked on.

One way we hope to reflect all the elements of this multi-faceted Chinese story is through our new China portal which pulls together all the best material from across the BBC in a single, easy-to-use page - with everything from the latest news stories to the fabulous Wild China documentary series and even a beginner's guide to Mandarin.

The second major point, and one that is close to my heart, is that the Beijing Games will be an opportunity for BBC Sport to offer even more choice to our audiences.

There is a lot of talk in media circles about slightly dry subjects like 'multi-platform broadcasting', 'time-shifting' and 'convergence'. I know this kind of jargon can grate with some people and to be honest it doesn't tend to mean too much when it's used out of context.

But what excites me is when all the theory and strategy starts to turn to reality - and that's what I'm convinced we are starting to see this summer, firstly with Euro 2008 and secondly, I hope, with the Olympics.

Back in the spring we re-designed the BBC Sport website to give more prominence to video and it's been great to see the results of that over the past couple of weeks.

We've offered live streaming of all the BBC's Euro 2008 matches as well as clip highlights of every game - and we're seeing record numbers of people watching the football on our site.

It feels like we're getting to a point where watching video on the web is no longer the preserve of a fairly niche audience. It's now hitting the mainstream, as the advent of the BBC's iPlayer has shown.

I'm convinced the Olympics can help take that process to the next level, not least because the time difference in China will mean much of the meaningful action will be taking place overnight and in the morning, UK time. Our audiences will want to follow the Olympics on their terms and it's up to us to offer that, with as much choice and convenience as we can possibly provide.

For Beijing we'll provide up to six different streams of live action on the red button and broadband; an in-depth website with all the latest reports and analysis; and an Olympics blog, which will draw on the best journalism the BBC has to offer. We're also looking to take our mobile services to another level, building on our successful WAP site by adding in more video options.

There is a lot still to get done. We'll keep toiling away, working on all our new media output, so that by the time 8 August comes around we'll be ready to put on the kind of show that the Olympics demands.

Suddenly it feels like those 50 days are going to slip by really fast...

In particular I said we'd take another look at the whole issue of the mix of content on the front page of the site - after we received comments that we were no longer providing a quick snapshot of the headlines from around our various sections.

At least that's what we thought.

What we had no way of knowing, but what became obvious when we re-launched the front page, was that lots of you read those headlines without clicking through to them - treating it as a 'daily sporting digest' in its own right.

Sometimes it's only when you take something away that you begin to discover its true worth - and once we had unveiled the new-look site, the absence of this digest proved to be one of the most contentious issues around the whole refresh. It became clear that people found it useful to just scan the various sports to get an instant fix of what had been going on, before then checking out another area of the site.

So over the last few weeks we've looked again at how the Sport homepage is set out and I'm pleased to report that we've decided to bring back this collection of headlines.

It's an audience-inspired reprieve, if you like.

The bottom section of bbc.co.uk/sport now contains a list of headlines from each of the main 14 sections of the site, one from each individual sport. It's worth stressing that this area of the page is not supposed to be the definitive run-down of the top sports stories of the day (they will still be showcased in their full glory higher up the page); it is intended as a snapshot of the 'best of the rest' from around the world of sport.

I've said before that this re-design is a complex long-term project - and we will be introducing some more changes over the course of the summer to bring the whole site in line with the front page. I'll be back to explain more when that happens...

The feedback we are receiving is all useful and will help as we continue to develop the site. As I’ve made clear on a couple of occasions now, the changes we implemented yesterday were just the start of a long-term project to redesign bbc.co.uk/sport and we will constantly review what we have done as part of the process of providing a first-class sports service.

In terms of the issues that have been raised by you, there are some recurring themes which we are more than happy to discuss. My colleague Julia Whitney, who looks after design and user experience for the BBC’s News and Sport websites, has run through some of the major questions (about widened pages, the use of white space and the new banner) on the BBC Internet Blog. I won’t repeat what Julia says, but will instead pick up on some other issues which are specifically to do with Sport and relate to our output, rather than design questions.

I come to the BBC Sport website for an overview of the day's sporting events and this is no longer being provided.

Just to be clear, one of our absolute objectives is to continue to provide this overview of sport, which we know our audience values, and it is definitely not our intention to change that. So we are showcasing the biggest event of the day at the top of the homepage, with a run-down of the other major stories on the right-hand side.

Hopefully when people grow accustomed to the layout they will see that we're still providing this daily digest of sport. But, again, we’ll keep looking at this area to ensure we have the right balance of content on our front page.

Clearly much of the feedback on this blog has been negative – and I am not for a minute going to duck that issue and somehow pretend that what we have done has been met with a universal chorus of approval. One question that comes from Adriaan is:

Will you listen to what the people are saying in this comments section? By my reckoning the "Antis" are more prevalent by a factor of 10 to 1. Their complaints and dislikes all seem pretty similar. Is Auntie listening to her licence payers?

The answer to that is, yes we are listening. This blog is here for a reason – it’s to allow for a genuine dialogue between BBC Sport and our audience and we are not about to ignore what is said on these pages.

But our audience research cannot just be confined to this blog. We have been working for months to develop an approach that works for our users and gives them a more dynamic sport website, now and in the future. This was considered research and usability testing - which was used by a team of technical, design and editorial experts to help define this new-look website.

And in some respects the amount of criticism we have received on this blog is unsurprising – particularly for those of us who have been through this kind of redesign before. When we last made a significant change to our layout, back in 2003, we were inundated with complaints (and that was back in the days before we even had a blog…). We changed from this design:

To this:

But over time things settled down, people got accustomed to the different design and, crucially, our editorial team was able to exploit the new layouts to full effect. That is something that hasn’t happened yet – but I remain confident that in the coming weeks and months, as we head towards the big events of the summer, we will be able to show you that our new site is a more effective platform for all the fantastic content BBC Sport has to offer.

I was reminded of that experience of 2003 when I read this comment from Nick about the reaction to our latest refresh:

It's like getting a new pair of slippers at Christmas - sure they don't feel quite right to start with, and all you want is to wear your old ones. But wait until Boxing Day and the new ones will be so comfy that you will have already forgotten what the old ones looked like.

Thanks for all your comments and I look forward to the day that the new site once again begins to feel like a comfy pair of slippers…