Yahoo China have a face-lift today!!
Yahoo China, which is owned by Alibaba group, dressed up like a classical China portal with more focus on content aggregation. The home page is now packed with text, It took TG a surprise when TG accessed the site with a colleague sitting adjacent. We both thought that we went to the wrong site!
Yahoo China’s new look is taking Sina.com approach and they start looking similar. As far as TG remember, Yahoo China has done the same thing before and have shifted back to Yahoo International website a year ago.
The abrupt change — so far TG has heard no announcement, may leave us to believe that the international website looks and feels is not doing very well in China, causing the company to revert back to its China approach.
Yahoo China home page
Sina China home page
September 4th, 2008 at 11:24 pm
(1) I was told that some high-profile websites choose to change high-traffic pages like homepages bit by bit (instead of a one-shot homepage face-lift). I wonder how often or if this approach is considered in China companies.
(2) Assume that the old Yahoo China homepage was unable to meet the business objectives, so it was changed. I wonder if Yahoo China had investigated the causes of the homepage failure. Is the “reversion” a way to address the causes and improve the homepage usability? Or, is the “reversion” just a “undo” (if one-step forward does not work, let’s take one-step backward)?
Regards,
Your Reader