Tuesday, March 25, 2008

Yahoo No Longer the Ugly Duckling, Gets Facelift - The Yahoo logo gets centered

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Every time one of the Internet giants comes with a redesign of their official page, the entire world is talking about it. This is exactly what’s happening right now as the Sunnyvale
super giant Yahoo has just rolled out a fresh facelift of its homepage. In fact, the entire redesign is actually a logo modification because the Yahoo folks have finally decided to center the company logo appearing on the official website.

And this after approximately 2 years since the last webpage change as the Yahoo homepage ‘suffered’ the last modification in May 2006, according to Philipp Lenssen from Google Blogoscoped.

Now, let’s see what’s new. As mentioned, the Yahoo logo is now centered and is placed above the search box and the search options. The left part of the website, the column that allows you to navigate among the Yahoo services, is now better organized and provides better browsing for all the users. The Yahoo logo is now placed in the center of the screen and I must admit it’s the first thing seen by a visitor once the website gets fully loaded.

The new Yahoo/the old Google
Have a look at that picture near this paragraph. In the upper part of the picture, there’s the search function of the new Yahoo: the logo placed above the search options and, then, the search box. Then, we have the old Google, the search function that was displayed on the official website of the search engine. As you can see, they are almost the same with a single difference: for Google, the search buttons are placed under the search box, while Yahoo placed them near the search box.

I’m not trying to insinuate that Yahoo has stolen Google’s design, but maybe the Sunnyvale folks are trying to use one of the Google’s secrets that attracted millions and millions of searchers every day.