YAHOO'S Spartan home page will look even less flashy soon, thanks to an upcoming makeover.

The Web media giant offered a preview of its redesigned front page (www.yahoo.com/upgrade) and said the simpler look will replace the old one in a few weeks.

What appears to be mostly cosmetic changes reflect an effort to get people to visit more often - partly by updating the content more frequently, said Ms Julie Herendeen, Yahoo's vice-president of network products.

New items include a weather report users can customise by Zip code and a 'Buzz Log' that analyses Web search logs to highlight newly popular search queries worldwide.

FOCUS ON NEWS

The redesign also moves Yahoo's news headlines higher on the page and refreshes its entertainment summary more frequently.

Yahoo is giving users the option of changing three menu buttons at the top to link to their favorite Yahoo services.

And it's further widening the Yahoo search box to accommodate wordy queries, while adding a few new options to confine searches to such specific categories as phone directories.

But Yahoo's own, human-edited directory of websites - what used to dominate the site - now gets much less room.

Some may be more interested in the redesign of the 'My Yahoo' area (my.yahoo.com), which lets users customise their personal pages with more material from other sites.

Yahoo is trying to simplify the process of adding Web content that's been published as free RSS (Really Simple Syndication) news feeds. Typing in 'brain research', for instance, yields a list of sites offering free RSS feeds on that topic


Source : Reuters