A well-crafted front page redesign can do wonders with redirecting traffic to other pages and subdomains owned by a site, as Yahoo UK’s update has done.
The new Yahoo look and feel we’ve seen in the US for a few weeks has been launched in the United Kingdom for Yahoo’s UK and Ireland portal page. Its design has benefited those downstream sites available from the main Yahoo UK page.
Heather Hopkins, an analyst for web analytics firm Hitwise, posted her observations about the update. She noted the number of properties in the top 40 downstream sites from Yahoo UK had increased from 18 to 22 since the new page arrived online in early July.
The total number of Yahoo properties in the top 100 downstream sites has remained virtually unchanged, Hopkins wrote, although Yahoo’s sites have become more prominent in that list.
Yahoo Answers has been one of the sites seeing more traffic travel downstream from the main page, Hopkins noted:
The site’s share of UK visits increased 12% last week and it became the 34th downstream site from Yahoo! UK & Ireland, compared with 56th the week before. Yahoo! Answers is a new product that allows consumers to ask questions and receive answers from individuals in the Yahoo! community.
Likewise, vertical sites Yahoo has developed now enjoy some increase visitorship. Hopkins compared traffic from sites listed on the left side of the home page to those denoted in boxes on the same page:
the other properties featured in that left hand column have not seen as big of an impact. The ones at the top of the list have benefited most, including Yahoo! 360 and Yahoo! Cars. Yahoo! UK & Ireland Cars became the 37th highest downstream site from the Yahoo! UK & Ireland homepage, up from 48th the week before and Yahoo! UK & Ireland 360 rose to the 64th downstream site, from 75th the week prior.
The boxes throughout the new Yahoo! UK & Ireland homepage seem to draw much more attention. Shopping, Weather, and Travel have all become more prominent in the downstream sites from the new homepage, some seeing their share of downstream visits more than double since the redesign.
Hopkins credited the Ajax technology and ease-of-use as being positives in Yahoo’s homepage redesign. People are visiting Yahoo’s community sites in greater number; more importantly, traffic to commercial verticals like shopping, cars, and travel likely matter more to advertisers.
Not every site needs a homepage redesign. But many could benefit from some consideration about the homepage and its role in moving traffic to areas that provide the means to convert visitors to customers.
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David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
