Yahoo will unveil a fresh new look this afternoon in an effort to maintain its title as the world’s most popular online destination and attract advertisers.
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Source: AP |
Initially, the new homepage will only be available in the U.S. and Europe at http://www.yahoo.com/preview. With many new interactive features, users will no longer need to click through to other pages to check the weather, email, listen to music, or get traffic updates.
Another new feature is Yahoo Pulse, which provides in-depth commentary on emerging cultural trends around the world.
A Major Transformation
Yahoo is upgrading its homepage at a critical moment in the battle for online dominance against longstanding rivals like MSN, AOL, and Google. Moreover, Yahoo must also build a defensive barrier against the encroachment of social networking sites like MySpace.com.
“Our goal is to create the best website on the Internet“, said Dan Rosenweig, Yahoo’s managing director.
This overhaul marks the first significant “transformation” of Yahoo’s homepage since September 2004. In fact, it represents a complete “makeover” compared to the Yahoo web page of 1994, when two Stanford University students—Jerry Yang and David Filo—founded it.
“Previously, Yahoo’s site looked outdated and cluttered. But now it’s very clean, bright, modern, and concise“, commented David Card, an analyst at Jupiter Research.
However, Card believes that Yahoo’s new website may still struggle to impress younger users, who are spending much of their online time browsing MySpace.com.
The most significant change to the new homepage is the high-interaction menu, featuring icons for weather, traffic, movie information, and quick access to popular Yahoo services like email, instant messaging, and music streaming.
A Risky Move
However, the redesign of the homepage is also a risky move. Of course, Yahoo wants to keep pace with the rapid changes of the Internet, but if they change too much too quickly, longtime users—who are accustomed to the old interface—may feel alienated and lost.
To mitigate this potential backlash, Yahoo selected the final design, code-named “Spirit,” after months of testing with a select group of users. More cautiously, they have not set the new interface as the default homepage of Yahoo.com for the first few months.
In the past year, the two most visited websites after Yahoo, MSN and AOL, have also changed their designs. The most dramatic transformation has been MSN’s, with numerous ambitious and secretive strategies from Microsoft.
On the other hand, while Google’s homepage offers little beyond a search tool, the company allows users to customize their homepage according to personal preferences.
The Battle for Popularity
Statistics from April show that Yahoo led with 105.4 million visitors, an increase of 11% from last year. MSN ranked second with 92.8 million visitors, up 6% from last year. Close behind was Google, with a remarkable 27% increase to 92.1 million visitors. AOL remained stagnant with 70.4 million visitors.
Meanwhile, traffic to MySpace.com—primarily among teenagers and young adults—has more than quadrupled in the past year, reaching 38.4 million visitors in the U.S. alone. Additionally, the total number of pages viewed on MySpace reached a staggering … 19 billion pages in April, surpassing both Google (11.9 billion pages), MSN (11.5 billion pages), and AOL (6.8 billion pages).
Yahoo still holds the title for the most pages viewed, with 31.2 billion pages in April. However, analysts believe that the skyrocketing growth of MySpace is overshadowing all the giants.
“The major players will need to change significantly due to the emergence of sites like MySpace“, said analyst Mike McGuire of Gartner.
Maintaining the title of the most visited and accessed website is extremely important for Yahoo, a company that derives a large portion of its revenue from advertising.
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