Yahoo Homepages Over the Last 15 Years: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Really Ugly)
by Kara Swisher
Posted on July 20, 2009 at 5:59 PM PT
Tomorrow, Yahoo will officially unveil the latest redesign of its homepage, an almost complete rejiggering of the look and feel of one of the most trafficked sites on the Internet.
The latest launch comes after about a half-dozen redesigns the homepage since Yahoo was founded, the last one in 2006.
You can read the full story of the new page here, but BoomTown thought it might also be instructive to take a look at what has come before it, seeing how the Yahoo (YHOO) front page has evolved since 1994.
Incredibly, that was 15 years ago.
Personally, I like 1994 and 1995, which were clean and clear with big font sizes, due to Yahoo positioning itself as a directory of the Web, although the 1995 logo and swirly buttons are wacky.
The one from 1997 is also an improvement, in the same list theme.
But in 2000, the whole page suddenly started bloating badly, with too much color and too many links.
Weight gain continued in 2002, and the page got even more colorfully confusing with ever-smaller font sizes in 2004.
The 2006 version was, thankfully, much simpler, but still a packed-out mess.
That new incarnation from the Silicon Valley icon, which you can see above, is a more back to the basics in style.
The latest launch, which Yahoo had previously said was coming in the fall, rolls out today for the hundreds of millions of users in the U.S. and will be extended to France, the U.K., Germany and India later this week.
Here are the screenshots of all the Yahoo pages in order, from 1994 to 2006 (click on the images to make them larger, and please excuse some blurriness–I got these shots from Yahoo):
1994:
1995:
1997:
2000:
2002:
2004:
2006:
