The BBC website is held in extremely high regard by web designers. Having briefly explored the grid and golden ratio as design principles, I'm interested in deconstructing the BBC site to see what I can learn from it.
The first thing I observed is that the image ratios do not hold to the golden ratio. The main story image is 304 wide and 171 high, a ratio of 1.78.
This ratio is repeated for the two smaller image sizes associated with sub stories in the main area and also those in the right column.
Other (non-news) areas of the site have a couple of other sizes. The large lead image on the sports area maintains the ratio at 464 x 261.
But the smaller thumbnail for video elements on the right column of the sports section has a ratio consistent with the video player (66 x 49, a ratio of 1.35).
The site has two main columns. The primary column has a width of 640px and is contains two sub-columns of 320px each.
The right hand column is slightly wider than these sub-columns coming it at around 340px, suggesting a fine grained grid metric of 20px.
The navigational tabs at the top of the page, which expand out to two rows, do not align with the columnar structure and are designed to fit the width of the text in the tab control rather than some standard tab width.