Yahoo is set to unveil a brand 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 numerous new interactive features, users will no longer need to click through multiple pages to check the weather, email, listen to music, or view traffic conditions in their area.
Another new feature is Yahoo Pulse, which provides in-depth insights into emerging cultural trends around the world.
A Major Overhaul
Yahoo is upgrading its homepage at a time when the competition with long-standing rivals such as MSN, AOL, and Google is becoming increasingly fierce. Furthermore, Yahoo must also build a defensive wall against the incursion 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 redesign marks the first significant “makeover” of Yahoo’s homepage since September 2004. In fact, it represents a complete transformation from the Yahoo website of the 1990s, which was founded by two Stanford University students, Jerry Yang and David Filo.
“Previously, Yahoo’s site looked very outdated and convoluted. But now it is clean, bright, modern, and concise“, commented David Card, an analyst at Jupiter Research.
However, Card believes that the new Yahoo website may still fail to impress the youth, who are spending most of their online time browsing through MySpace.com.
The most notable change in the new homepage is the high-interactivity 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, revamping the homepage is also a risky move. Of course, Yahoo wants to keep pace with the rapid changes in the Internet landscape, but if the changes are too drastic, longtime users accustomed to the old interface may feel alienated and disoriented.
To prevent this negative scenario, Yahoo selected the final design code-named “Spirit” after several months of testing with a select group of users. More cautiously, they have decided not to set the new interface as the default homepage for Yahoo.com during the initial months.
In the past year, the two most visited websites after Yahoo, MSN and AOL, have also undergone redesigns. The most dramatic transformation has been MSN, with many ambitious and secretive strategies from Microsoft.
For its part, although Google’s homepage offers little beyond its search tool, the company allows users to customize their homepage according to their personal preferences.
The Battle for Hits
Statistics from April show that Yahoo leads with 105.4 million visitors, an 11% increase from the previous year. MSN comes in second with 92.8 million visits, up 6% from last year. Close behind is Google, with a 27% surge to 92.1 million visitors. AOL remains stagnant with 70.4 million visitors.
Meanwhile, traffic to MySpace.com, primarily among teenagers and young adults, has more than quadrupled in the past 12 months, reaching 38.4 million visitors in the U.S. alone. Additionally, the number of pages viewed on MySpace totaled a staggering … 19 billion pages in April, surpassing both Google (11.9 billion pages) and 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 MySpace’s skyrocketing growth is overshadowing all the major players.
“These giants will have to change significantly due to the emergence of sites like MySpace“, said Mike McGuire, an analyst at Gartner.
Maintaining the title of the most viewed and most visited website is extremely important for Yahoo, a company that derives a significant portion of its revenue from advertising.
Tian Yi
