Yahoo! The Old...The Ugly...and The New....

I agree with Brunett and Marshall that one critical point about Web sites is that Web pages and Web sites change regularly (90). A lot of what we see on the Web is grouped amongst categories of interest and then divided up into subgroups within themselves. This is true not only in the search engine but within the website itself. When you click on a specific link in a website, it is going to connect you to other related resources or information based off the initial link you selected. The key distinction is that the web is much more continuous than discontinuous from different domains of activity (91).

When searching for information on Websites, most people not only look for ease of access, flow of information, and options, we expect it. As a commercial entity, Yahoo! has been successful at providing an easily usable site that can be personalized (91).

The old Yahoo homepage is somewhat overloaded with texts or links. It lacks images and aesthetics that keep the Web page warm and inviting. It is extremely text heavy that can be overpowering and can give too many options/links to choose from. Burnett and Marshall are accurate when describing how the links, even in older versions, with use of graphic user interface (GUI) and the icons clicked on can help lead or guide you to other interlinked information (82). This is prominent in the old homepage of Yahoo. All it is consisted of is links that lead to more links that are all interlinked.

Obviously with the advances in web design, and the knowledge of what makes a great website is ever changing. This is prominent with most or all companies and/or information sites. They all, at one point or another, give themselves a "face lift". You have to pay attention to the changing times and what is in more demand. Not that people are lazy, or don't want to read, but the simple fact that a "picture is worth a thousand words" makes sense. Not only to see and read a headline, but to have an image to go with it makes it much more real and interesting, as well as inviting.

The new Yahoo homepage is more personalizable, more sociable. If we are spending a lot of time on a specific page, the option of being able to personalize it and have specific links, information easily accessible and readily available the minute we get on the page, is time saving, extremely beneficial, and wanted. It's nice to be able to create or guide the web page to be geared towards things I am most interested in. We are wanting and looking for quick search engines, time saving pages, the idea of personalization is greatly warranted. The new page is obviously more appealing, on many different levels, but in essence still holds a lot of great concepts from the previous. It does so, but is visually stimulating, which goes a long way.









"Web Theory": Burnett, Robert; Marshall, P. David. "Web Theory: An Introduction".
2003. Routledge.