19 May 2006 | Author: Mike Hanna

Yahoo! is to design its homepage to adjust for Yahoo! search keeping up with the competition

Yahoo! has launched a beta version of its homepage which is a complete reshuffle of the page. The new homepage is described by Yahoo! as the biggest change its homepage had undergone.

The reason for the new homepage design seems to be to focus the homepage more on the Yahoo! search bar. The new homepage has the search bar placed more prominently at the top of the page. It is a wider page layout, although you have the option of making it the old narrower size. The new width comes about because Yahoo! has moved its main services box to the left hand side of the page instead of being just below the search bar.

Instead of having the six main icons of Finance, Music, Tech, Mail, My Yahoo! and Messenger along the top with the brand logo, there is now just the search bar and the logo with a couple of buttons below the logo for My Yahoo! and My Mail.

The biggest change for the new homepage however is the change from just a static page displaying Yahoo!'s services as a portal into a dynamic page that informs you if you have mail or if any of your messenger friends are online - this is automated an requires no user interaction. The new mail function will display on the homepage how many new messages you have (if you are already signed in of course), and if you hover over that link it will show you a snippet of the top of your Yahoo! email inbox.

The changes are a step forward by Yahoo!, and are said to be driven by Yahoo! taking more notice of what users want to do, but it also looks like the changes may have a lot to do with Yahoo! changing its main focus to search.

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