Yahoo recently overhauled their homepages – both the local and global versions. The first major difference is the color scheme. Finally, their marketing department realized that they can’t brand themselves purple if the color of their logo and site is red. They’ve changed to color scheme to reflect the “purple hunt” campaign that they’ve been running for the past few months. Yahoo still isn’t going the simple-minimalist direction of Google with their redesign. They’re still heavy on content and they’ve added a new sidebar feature to the global homepage version. Some screen shots and insights about the changes after the break.
Yahoo! Global Homepage Sidebar
Basically Yahoo wants you to browse all of your favorite sites and access your social networks inside the Yahoo portal. You just add the sites that you frequently visit and they’re included in the list in your left sidebar each time you access the Yahoo Portal. Here’s a screen shot for your reference:
If you mouse over the sites on your list, a floater window pops up inside the page showing the contents of the site that you’re thinking of browsing. It looks flashy but I hate functions like this because I personally don’t want to see anything that I haven’t clicked yet.
Yahoo Philippines… so Purple
The new Yahoo Philippines homepage doesn’t have the sidebar function yet but they’ve really turned the site purple. The localized content is also refreshing to see and read. Here’s a screen shot of the new Yahoo Philippines page:
Over-all it looks good but I don’t really know how many people type in “yahoo.com.ph” as opposed to “yahoo.com”. Personally I go to “yahoo.com” more because that’s what I’m used to typing and I can easily get new content in the local Yahoo site in other news websites like Inquirer.Net. The move to purple is a good change, but there are still so many things that can be improved on for the portal, especially the local version. There is still no compelling reason for me to go there over all the other portal sites that I visit.
I still like google, hehe