Yahoo! Set To Launch Home Page Redesign; New Look For Search, Too

Tuesday, July 21, 2009 9:21

Posted in category Yahoo!, search engines

After nearly a year of testing, Yahoo! is unveiling its overhauled home page, which it is describing as the “most radical” change to Yahoo.com since the company started 15 years ago. The last redesign was in 2006, and Yahoo which has struggled to define its place on the web hopes “the new look,” in the words of CEO Carol Bartz, “will give it some ‘mojo.’ ” The bottom line is that for all of Yahoo.com’s traffic, there’s a strong perception that it’s not cutting edge a la Facebook or Twitter. Users in the U.S. will have a chance to opt in to the new design Tuesday afternoon; people in the U.K. and India will have access later this week. The redesign puts a heavy emphasis on customization.

Users, for instance, will be able to add apps to a list of “My Favorites” on the home page, in order to get quick access to services from both Yahoo and also from third-party sites (Click on image to the left for several screenshots). In a conference call with reporters Monday, Yahoo SVP Tapan Bhat said that the company’s goal was to make Yahoo.com the center for people’s online lives. He pointed to previous versions of the site, which often included a long list of various Yahoo properties, where apps will now be featured instead, saying they were “about Yahoo, not about the user.” Of course, there’s a revenue opportunity for Yahoo here too: The company has claimed that ad impressions on the home page increased between 10 percent and 20 percent due to the inclusion of ads with apps.

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