The Biz of Coding

Yahoo! Inc.’s New Home Pages — Historical View

by Ujwal Tickoo on May 17th, 2006

Yahoo Inc. (YHOO) has updated its Home Page. The History of Yahoo Inc.’s Home Page makeovers has been nicely presented by C|Net in 9 slides. Its worth a look. To view the history of home page changes for the world’s most visited Portal is to get a sense of how the Web has transformed.

I love the look and feel of the new home page though some duplications could have been avoided as pointed out by Greg Linden:

I see four links to News, two links to Mail, two links to Weather, three links to Entertainment, and several links to Travel on my Yahoo home page.

Greg also continues with (what I believe is a bit harsh ) criticism; but something worth considering as a different perspective. (I think he is looking for a behaviour similar to Google Finance’s current behaviour):

But, the main issue is that the page does not do a good job at what should be the goal of the Yahoo home page, helping people get to interesting content and services at Yahoo.

I think the Yahoo home page should focus on doing two things:

1. Get people quickly to parts of Yahoo they like
2. Help people discover parts of Yahoo they might like but don’t know about

That’s it. Help me get where I want to go. Help me find new, useful, and interesting stuff.

Richard McManus likes the change:

All in all, I think the new Yahoo.com preview page is a big improvement on the old design - in terms of both ‘look n’ feel’ and functionality. Considering that yahoo.com is the most trafficked webpage in the world - and so any changes they make to it affect many millions of users - I think the new design is a big step forward. It’s much more contemporary-looking than the previous version and introduces a decent slab of ‘web 2.0′ functionality to the masses.

What do you think?

POSTED IN: Yahoo