Yahoo has pushed its new home page out with several new improvements.

New Yahoo Homepage

I am not sure when they released the latest version of the Yahoo home page, but the Ajax based User Interface brings a new level of information and functionality to Yahoo.com and its related properties.

Hovering over the left rail gives users insight into what else is available from Yahoo’s home page without having to click away.

Yahoo Home Page Ajax

Will the new Ajax features create a stickier Yahoo home page and encourage visitors to make Yahoo their homepage increasing like Yahoo hopes?

Check back in a month to see whether these improvements have measurably increased Yahoo’s overall visitor count and session length or not.

Yahoo! has an amazing plans for us (spcially it’s users ), and this is quote to show you what it’ll be looking like :

Yahoo has invited the press to an event in San Francisco today where it will announce the next steps in its open strategy (details found here).

As GigaOm speculated over the weekend, we should be hearing details about the deployment of applications on Yahoo Mail. We’ll post the details here as they become available, starting within the next few minutes.

WordPress CEO Toni Schneider is here, along with someone from Xoopit, which suggests that both companies will have integrations to announce.

Read the hole entry HERE

Randa

Well, I thought for sure that there would be more people talking about the Yahoo homepage redesign, but apparently there aren’t that many ‘testers’.

Lucky for you, though – I’m one of em.

So let’s take a look-see, starting with what you’ll get when you visit Yahoo.com:

Yahoo listens and cleans up their act. Or at least hides it.

One of the first things you’ll notice is how CLEAN it all is. They no longer fill up every available pixel of screen real estate like in the old days. Now the maximum width is 970px with the main content only dropping down to 750px. I did notice that the layout was NOT fluid though, but that could change I suppose.

Where has everything gone, you might ask? Well, actually – nowhere. That big fat ad in the middle right above, will slide down smoothly in jqueryish style, as seen in the picture below (click it for bigger view)

Where are all the Yahoo services links - OH! there they are!

And what about that sidebar on the left, did it grow too? Why, yes it did.

Yahoo apparently has an afinity for ajax, cause this site is loaded with it. The hottest links are positioned to the left (we all know that’s one of the first places people look), and when you click on one of the selections, such as mail, stocks, or weather – as shown in the above pic, it Pops open, and presto -there’s the info you want.

You want additional information, beyond what you can see in the preview pane? Depending on the service, you may be sent to another page, such as yahoo finance, or you may be presented with an accordion view, like when I click on movies – click a new movie, it slides open to reveal show times, a link to a trailer, and a quick review rating (A-F). Click on horoscope and I get all 12 signs that I can click one after another, all without leaving the preview box.

Check out your mail in a flash with Yahoo

Clicking the mail button reveals your 10 most recent mail messages, and you also have the option to add gmail to the list. (note: I haven’t done this yet, so I can’t comment on that functionality). If you want to view more, you just click the link above the messages to go right to your standard mailbox.

And yes, I’ve had some issues with twitter lately, in case you haven’t noticed. But that’s a whole other story. Speaking of twitter, if you’d like to follow me, you can find me here – my twitter account.

After using the page for several days, I can vouch for how much of an improvement it is. The old page was overloaded and hurt my eyes to look at. The new layout, while smaller, is much less cramped. The larger icons for the main services are great, but it makes the tiny icons look outdated by comparison. I can live with that, though …

The real interesting thing though, is how much it relies on javascript. For those users that like to browse without it running, you’re out of luck. Your content won’t load into the panels, you won’t be able to get to the additional services either. Does this mean that web developers should stop worrying about whether or not that cool javascript functionality breaks their site? I guess they can if they work at Yahoo. That will be interesting to see how it develops.

Maybe Yahoo’s not dying after all. Or if they are, they’ll at least look good in the casket.

Новая главная страница Yahoo home page, которая до этого была в закрытом тестировании, теперь доступна для всех, кто использует IE или Firefox (начиная с версии 1.5) по адресу yahoo.com/preview. Сделано несколько косметических изменений: увеличена ширина страницы, а также область поиска; Ajax стал использоваться ещё интенсивнее, чтобы сделать страницу более интерактивной (например, наведите мышью над значком “mail” справа). Более подобную информацию можно узнать на официальном блоге Yahoo Search.

Ключевые изменения включают добавления “персонального ассистента”, который может показывать последние полученные почтовые сообщения, онлайн-друзей из Yahoo IM и другую информацию (траффик, погоду и т.д.). Также был добавлен Yahoo Pulse!,“a window to the attention stream of our estimated half-billion users”.

Ричард МакМанус (Richard MacManus) опубликовал подкаст с Ашем Пателом (Ash Patel, Yahoo Chief Product Officer) и вице-президентом Front Doors Тапаном Бха (Tapan Bha), в котором они обсуждают этот запуск.

Скриншоты нового и старого Yahoo:

Новый:

Старый:

Источник: Techcrunch