Yahoo Redesigns Its Home Page [9/19/2008]

Yahoo recently redesigned its home page to give users a more personalized view of the Internet. The Yahoo home page is currently accessed by approximately 100 million U.S. users a month; 300 million worldwide.

As the site that gets the most traffic on the web (according to Yahoo), the web giant is looking to blend its broadcast and editorial services with the personal preference of users. This would make the web giant more of a starting point for users, rather than a network of less insular properties.

As an example, the new home page has a navigational tab on the left-hand column with links to a user's 10 or 20 favorite sites. This streamlined navigation system is an alternative to more outdated site savers like bookmarks, for example. The new home page design uses personalization technology so that users who have signed into their Yahoo account can access email or news -- not only from Yahoo, but from other sites as well, e.g., Google's gmail, or eBay auctions.

Personalization is the key to the new redesign. The ingenuity of it is that it will allow users to stay on the Yahoo site while navigating across a range of other sites they're interested in. Yahoo has dubbed the new technology behind the redesign the Content Optimization Knowledge Engine.

Fully aware that only 15 percent of its users subscribe to the current MyYahoo personalization service, Yahoo is proceeding cautiously with this personalized approach. Another reason the company sees for moving forward slowly is that the competition has been making changes as well. Facebook, MSN and MySpace have all made sweeping changes to their sites. The noted exception has been search engine giant Google, which has stuck with its simple design.

Yahoo has perhaps been wise to not forge a path in redesigning all of its site at once. Users of some of the competition's sites haven't always been pleased with redesigns, preferring classic, familiar versions of their favorite sites.

The only way Yahoo will know for sure if the new redesign is a success with users is when it is released to independent developers who start to create their own applications and interfaces on Yahoo.com.

This new redesign is being tested among a random sampling of Yahoo users initially. Later, a full-scale beta test using about 1 percent of Yahoo's audience will take place, with a full-scale rollout to follow later. Tests will be conducted with users from Britain, India, France and the U.S. The last time the site was redesigned was some two years ago. It took the company a full six months to get all the kinks worked out and for it to be fully implemented.

BOOSTING EMPLOYEE MORALE

Amidst all of this, Yahoo has faced some hurdles recently, including a rough advertising market, more competition and hostile takeover bids, to name a few. To boost employee morale, the company held a "dress purple" campaign. The campaign encourages employees to come to work dressed in purple, the company's primary color.

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