Yahoo Buys Itself New Clothes

Metro was undercover moving at a glacial pace only before Yahoo exposed it’s codename for the new version of its homepage. The the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company showed no intentions to take the wraps off the redesigned page until the fall, but out of blue it had all the pieces in place now. This time Yahoo decided to take a more holistic view of its Home page, all centered around the user. The giant company would allow a selection for a new, more personalized version of the home page beginning Tuesday afternoon. This would be allowed in opt-in beta basis for the millions of users in US and would be extended to France, the U.K and India later this week. There’s a lot of fuss around Yahoo’s revamped home page, we went on to dug out the real fact.

Tapan Bhat, a Yahoo senior vice president boasts

Every pixel on the page is relevant now

He claims

We have taken out a lot of our own stuff that was creating a dead zone for our users.

Bhat oversaw the revisions on Yahoo home page.

Let’s find out how far his words go

Changes to Home page

It’s indeed a fundamental change, completely different from the previous launch candidates. To put it straight, it a complete re-engineering of the look and feel of Yahoo’s most important page that’s attracts most traffic for the site.

Changes in Yahoo’s front page are important, as its the face of the site that plays a calling card for the users. and advertisers as well as Wall street. For now an estimated 330 million unique visitors every month. More than 570 million people worldwide visited Yahoo in May, according to comScore Inc.

Yahoo has redesigned its home page several times since it was founded in 1990. But, the latest design is most hyped and contrasting.

Convergence of sites

In a bid to pull the crowd, Yahoo has assorted eBay, Facebook, and Twitter for an easier access.

Clearly, it’s Yahoo’s effort to revamp its core business which involves displaying content and highlighting advertisements to a large, general audience on the Net. Yahoo’s profitability lags far behind its archrival in search market, Google, which depends mainly on search ads for revenue. In addition,  Yahoo faces increasing pressure from Microsoft’s online business and new arrivals such as Facebook as well.

Yahoo is planning to offer its audience a more personalized version of its home page. The redesigned page would not only allow people to select basic applications for Yahoo sites, but also other sites such as eBay, Facebook, and Twitter. These application would  be available on the left side of the page under the customizable section called My Favorites.

The users can import variety of applications from other Web site onto a My Favorites section. There are 65 applications  available on Yahoo’s new page that include competing e-mail services from Google Inc and AOL as well as plugg-ins for Facebook and MySpace.

With the new move Yahoo also expects success with advertisers. Bhat said this would create great opportunities for advertisers to target content and context, while demonstrating a movie application that showed a prominent ad along with movie showtimes locally designed for a particular user. For more the My Favorites feature would arrive on Yahoo’s search page making the search site and its results on it, more like a portal to access content.

Implications for the Change

Yahoo search is reeling under pressure from indomitable Google, which has doubled up with the entry of Microsoft’s Bing. With ads displayed in application adjacent to search results the company will be able to extract more money from its search operation.

By allowing Yahoo’s content to other sites’ operations and letting other sites use Yahoo data such as Facebook like status updates comes as a part of Yahoos Open Strategy. Evidently, it’s designed to surge the traffic by increasing users’ activity on Yahoo, attract new visitors in the site and make the company more look more potent for advertisers.

Coming Soon

Come August Yahoo, would allow its users the freedom to choose the type of news people can see, provided with a slider that moves on the spectrum between fun and serious.

Further, the giant company would be revamping its mobile site. This one could be cool feature, as when users customize Yahoo for use with regular computers, it would be carried to their mobile version as well.

Bhat indicated, that things are moving in the right direction for the company. Let’s see if the remaking of the home page could call the company to go for the gold.

Well,  if you are looking for a first-hand experience of the new changes as default on visit https://yahoo.com/try new or clicking on Yahoo promotions for the change.