The past 12 months have not been easy for BBC World Service. Following a significant cut in funding from the Foreign Office in October last year, it has involved painful decisions to close five language services, make stringent savings across the board and lose highly valued colleagues.

Protesters celebrated in Tahrir Square after President Mubarak stood down

Yet despite the tight financial environment, we have continued to raise the bar on quality and creativity in our services. Today, impressive new figures are published which demonstrate that the BBC's international journalism is as valued, vibrant and relevant as it has ever been.

New independent research shows that people across the Middle East have increasingly turned to the BBC during the Arab uprising with an unprecedented rise in audiences. Overall audiences to the BBC's Arabic services have climbed by more than 50% to a record high of 33.4 million adults weekly - up from 21.6 million before the Arab Spring.

BBC Arabic TV's audience has risen to 24.5 million from 13.5 million - up by more than 80%. Weekly reach across Egypt, Iraq, Saudi, Jordan, Lebanon and Morocco has nearly doubled to a weekly reach of 18.4% from 9.8%.*

The biggest increases were seen in Egypt, where the BBC Arabic TV audience quadrupled to a weekly reach of 16.2%, reaching 9.3 million people.

BBC Arabic TV also saw its weekly audience increase by almost a quarter in Iraq to a weekly reach of 26.6% (from 21.5%) reaching 4.9 million people. In addition, its weekly audience more than doubled in Jordan (weekly reach of 22.4% from 8.8%) and in Saudi Arabia (weekly reach of 24.6% from 12.2%).

These figures show that, in turbulent times, the BBC's aim to provide trusted news and impartial information is as valued as ever. International audiences in the Middle East are turning to us for independent, dependable and unvarnished news that they can trust.

Behind the numbers, and in an increasingly competitive media market, this is proof that there will always be space for high-quality journalism that seeks to inform all, even-handedly.

I am proud of our journalists and staff for never losing sight of the BBC's core purpose and hope our journalism makes a practical difference to people living through fragile times and sometimes frightening change.

* Weekly audience estimates are based on independent studies that were carried out by the Broadcasting Board of Governors' International Audience Research Program (IARP) in Egypt, Iraq, Saudi, Jordan, Lebanon and Morocco. The Broadcasting Board of Governors is an independent federal agency responsible for all US government-supported, civilian international broadcasting.

Liliane Landor is languages controller of BBC Global News.

Anyone who uses the BBC homepage may find this post by BBC Future Media's James Thornett interesting: it describes how the page is changing, and why.

PS For the avoidance of doubt, James' blog is about changes to the main BBC homepage at www.bbc.co.uk not the BBC News homepage which is here.

Steve Herrmann is editor of the BBC News website.

A few weeks ago we announced that we were making some improvements to the BBC's Weather website, including a clearer, more focused design of the homepage.

Since then we've been running a "beta" version of the new site to allow us to try out these new features and listen to your comments and feedback. Following that successful trial period, I'm pleased to say that we are launching the new weather site today.

We've had a great response to the beta site which has received around 230,000 visitors per week and I'd like to thank those who have taken the time to try it out and give us your comments. These figures are very similar to the numbers of people who have tested beta versions of the new iPlayer site and the BBC homepage, which shows how many of you value the weather website.

We've worked hard to improve the functionality of the site, whilst retaining all of the more detailed forecast information such as humidity, pressure and visibility. The majority of the feedback we've received has been very positive with many users saying that a variety of information can be accessed at a glance, they like the design and perhaps most importantly, the website is clearer and easier to use.

I've blogged about the key improvements to the site previously but as a reminder these are:

• A more focused and clear homepage design giving instant access to a five day forecast and a video forecast.
• Easily personalised forecast favourites which allow you to save a range of locations to appear in the drop down menu.
• Improved navigation across the site allowing more editorial content, including audience pictures on the homepage.

We've listened to your suggestions while the beta site has been live and also implemented some changes that were already in the pipeline such as the print function and the full UK forecast map.

Although we're launching the new site officially today, we'll continue to look at ways to improve the site and there are aspects that we'll continue to work on over the coming weeks. These include making the maps load more smoothly and developing a mobile version of the site.

In addition to these improvements, we want to hear your views on the new site and we'll continue to monitor your feedback, we're using the #bbcweather hashtag on Twitter to group conversation, or you can comment below.

Liz Howell is head of BBC Weather.