White is the new blue, as MSN experiments with a new look for its home page with a beta test.
I don’t know who greasergrrl@hotmail.com is, but the new beta page for MSN seems to think I’m her. That and it’s raining this morning, too. Whoever she is, the beta page seems made just for her, because clicking on the Not You? Link sends the browser to the current MSN home page.
If you visit the beta page today and are falsely accused of greasergrrl-ness, don’t click away just yet. MSN has made further use of Ajax in building the news boxes on this page, an approach similar to that used more extensively by Yahoo! News.
White replaces blue as the dominant color on this new site. The MSN beta page definitely can be filed under “testing phase” right now. All this links, except for the three under a picture of a food-flinging baby (maybe she’s greasergrrl), point to www.msn.com.
In the topic boxes, the + and – signs work, allowing more or fewer headlines to be displayed without reloading the whole web page. IE6 SP 2 kept throwing a “script error” icon on the bottom left of the browser window, and it may be that after this article goes online that the problems I’m encountering will go away.
On a side note, the Start.com page seems to have been taken down and replaced with a simple color-changing GIF in place of what had been a more extensive display of MSN’s dynamic content work.
David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business. Email him here.
