A couple of weeks ago OJR reported that Yahoo News – “the second most trafficked News & Information site on the Web” – was in the process of a re-design. That design has now gone live in beta form, with the tagline “More News. More Relevant. More About You.”
From a design pov: – They’ve toned down the blue colour of the links. – News sources are now highlighted more – AP will be pleased, as they’re gung-ho on branding their content. – Tabs are now used for the section menu, enabling them to go from 3 columns to 2 and so free up white space.
[nb just as I finish that last sentence, Yahoo has flicked the switch and made the new design live on http://news.yahoo.com].
The things I like the best though are the increased focus on RSS and search, and the integration with My Yahoo. From the intro page:
“Yahoo! News now offers My Sources so you can select all the news sources you want from around the Web. Choose from a range of providers that offer RSS (Really Simple Syndication) format, just like you do on My Yahoo!. To make it really simple, any source you added to your My Yahoo! page will automatically be added to your Yahoo! News home page.”emphasis mine
Not only does the new design allow users to subscribe to non-traditional news sources, but the “dive deeper into topics” buttons are a fantastic example of topic search n’ subscribe applied to a major media website. Congrats to the Yahoo News team! I know that I have some Yahoo staff subscribed to my blog, so perhaps my RSS and Topic-based Search evangelism is paying off in some small way 🙂
p.s. Google, please sit up and take notice – instead of spending your time rejecting fantastic news sources.
Originally published on ReadWriteWeb (archived copy)