Yahoo’s new homepage
– posted May 17th, 2006 by Laurence Veale No comments
Yahoo have redesigned their homepage (not the entire site) - see it at yahoo.com/preview. Jared Spool mentions it over on Brain Sparks but doesn’t draw any conclusions apart from saying the new “home page uses a lot of AJAX and fancy display techniques”.
I beg to differ. AJAX is all the jazz at the moment, along with rounded corners, gradients and cool mouseovers, but I’m not really sure how much value it actually adds in the overall context.
Using AJAX in a cheeky startup that hopes to flip is one thing. Adding it to the most visited page on the web (according to Yahoo) is another. My beef with AJAX and Web 2.0 is that it’s plastered with beta. In software development parlance, that means it’s still being tested and not yet ready for release. In Yahoo’s case, this is a bit of experiment, and we the visitors are the guinea pigs. They may have not labelled it “BETA”, but Yahoo have done the next best thing by allowing visitors to switch back to the old version.
As for AJAX and accessibility, that will be the topic of a more indepth article coming soon from iQ Content.
Find out more about the Yahoo redesign over at the Yahoo Interface blog where you’ll find the thinking behind it and the benefits they hope it will bring.
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Categories Accessibility, Design
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