Yet Another Yahoo! Home Page Redesign

Hold on to your chairs, kids! It’s about to happen again. The venerable Yahoo! is about to change its home page — yet one more time!

Here’s what the page looks like today:

Click to see the current Yahoo! home page

Here’s what Yahoo! is now previewing as their next home page:

Click to see the newest Yahoo! home page

Of course, Yahoo! has a history of making changes to home pages. Most of you probably don’t remember what it looked like in 1996:

Click to see the 1996 Yahoo! home page

Or even what it looked like in 2000:

Click to see the 2000 Yahoo! home page

You might remember 2003:

Click to see the 2003 Yahoo! home page

Yahoo! changes their home page a lot. Each time, they make it a little better for users to get to the content they want. This new home page uses a lot of AJAX and fancy display techniques. Try it by moving your mouse over the “Weather” box.

One of the interesting things about this new page is it’s just this page. Their existing pages of Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Finance, and Yahoo! Movies seem to remain unchanged. This isn’t a site relaunch. It’s just a change of the home page design.

That’s because Yahoo! knows that the major site relaunch is dead. (Notice Yahoo! is borrowing from eBay’s playbook by letting users try the home page on their own terms and giving them the option to switch back:

So, here we go again. One more change. I guess they’ll keep doing it until they get it right!

Update: Bill Scott has posted an interesting description of the new features of the home page here.