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Yahoo HomepageOne-Stop Shop Price: Free
by John Brandon 
We don’t envy Yahoo’s position. The company helped pioneer online personalization with great products like My Yahoo. At the same time, it is a media company sitting on tons of content, marketing partnerships, and other revenue-generating opportunities that it must find a way to present to consumers whenever they pass through the mighty portal’s front door. The new Yahoo homepage is a major redesign of the site’s entryway that tries to split the difference between promotion and personalization.
Technically, the new page is dazzling. Now available in a widescreen or narrowscreen console configuration, Yahoo’s homepage is much more appealing, and you can even set the menu colors. The main column uses a tabbed interface that allows visitors to rifle through feature stories for the big content buckets like Entertainment, Sports, and In the News, without reloading the page. The search box is more efficient, too, with live tabs to apply a query to images, local, etc., again without having to reload the page. But nothing makes Yahoo feel more like a genuine application than the Personal Assistant. This block of items to the upper right gives you direct access to your Yahoo Mail account, Messenger, Horoscopes, local weather, and traffic reports. Mousing over one of the badges makes the entire window expand to reveal details, like the first few messages in your inbox. Very cool indeed. Eventually, the left nav bar that guides users into Yahoo’s main content areas will be customizable. We can’t wait, because we’re less enthused about random elements like Yahoo Pulse, which spies on what is popular among others. Also, it would be nice to customize the tabbed news and features sections. Yahoo says it wants to put the user at the center of the new portal experience. The new homepage gets us halfway there, but it also makes us hunger for even more personal control. Featured Site Sponsors
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