Yahoo's seen the future. At least one critic says, it looks a lot like AOL.
The company's new home page design, released in preview Tuesday, is slick, clean, bright and light. It uses Ajax technology to enliven drop down menus, makes the front page a "no click" zone to check your e-mail, local weather and traffic, or check your IM buddies online.
But there does seem to be at least a resemblance to AOL's home page. One reason you might think they look a bit alike is Yahoo's greater use of multimedia, only natural as it increasingly emphasizes its role as a media company.
Judge for yourself. The live home pages, AOL.com, Yahoo.com. (The URL is www.yahoo.com/preview and you may have to hit "refresh" to bring it up.)
This is the first redesign of Yahoo's front page in almost 18 months.
Blame/ or credit the similarity in appearance to the use of the Web's latest and greatest technology, Ajax. Mousing over features creates drop down menus for previews and easy access. The new home page is wider, reflecting growing monitor sizes, and there is more use of tabs for easier site hopping.
If you have a "My Yahoo" page, where you've stacked RSS feeds, it, too, is just one click away, and easy to add pages catering to your own interests and hobbies.
The new home page is still in a test phase, the company says. Eventually it will be the default, according to Ash Patel, the chief product officer. Here's a podcast from Read/Write Web with Patel and Tapan Bhat, (get this title) vice president of front doors. And here's a Welcome video from Yahoo's founders, posted on the new home page.
I like it. What about you? Did they leave anything out? E-mail me at fb@barnako.com, or call the toll free listener line at 1-(877)-224-8009.
At the time of this posting, I owned shares of Yahoo.
I really like the redesign. It appears less cluttered and things are easier to find. The AJAX effects are also quite cool. While the design does appear to be similar to AOL, I like the Yahoo redesign much better.
Posted by: Asif (SINLetter) | May 16, 2006 at 16:33