Lots of Yahoo news today. In addition to the new Yahoo Finance site that launches later today, Yahoo is finally taking its new home page, previously in beta at yahoo.com/preview, live on the main yahoo.com site. The launch is U.S. only, other markets will follow shortly.
We’ve all know this was coming for some time. Yahoo began testing the new home page with some users back in February. In May, Yahoo made the new page available to everyone at the yahoo.com/preview domain linked to above.
The new home page has a significantly different layout than the current look, as well as some Ajax integration, DHTML and more personalization features. Other new features are discussed in a Yahoo blog post discussing the new home page on May 15, 2006. In that post, they call it “the most significant redesign of the www.yahoo.com home page ever”. Given that Yahoo is the largest site on the Internet (despite recent gains by Myspace), their embrace of new web technologies is an important evolution. Millions of people may have their first interaction with Ajax in the coming days.
See Richard MacManus for more, as well as some nonsense about a video competition that Yahoo’s putting on around this. Great scoop, Richard.
Screen shots of the new and old Yahoo pages:
New:
Old:
