The launch of a handy dandy new Yahoo homepage may not be too far off now. A member of the team responsible for its redesign has posted an update, and it sounds like all sorts of progress has been made. Bucket testing is underway, too.
Tech-inclined individuals with nothing urgent on their slates should feel free to dive right into Nicholas C. Zakas’s 1,100-word post on the Yahoo User Interface Blog. To save time, we’ll try to stick to some of the more comprehensible homepage highlights here.
First, Zakas expresses a desire to “keep it small, keep it fast.” He writes, “The Front Page can’t afford to be slow, so we needed to have as little code as possible to get everything up and running.” This might help Yahoo compete with the famously sparse and fast-loading Google.com.
Next, we should touch on the engineer’s interest in allowing code portability. Certain aspects of Yahoo’s new homepage may well show up on many sites throughout the organization, and it looks like the company’s saving time and money by planning for that now.
On a similar note, Zakas and his team are focused on keeping future upgrades to Yahoo’s homepage from becoming a problem. He explains, “The project to create a new Front Page is an incredibly long one and we wanted to be as forward-looking as possible. We knew that if we created the framework on YUI 2.x that we’d be hard pressed to get time to upgrade later on. By building on YUI 3 from the start, we eliminated the need for developing an upgrade path later on.”
So Yahoo fans should hold tight, keep an eye out for that bucket testing, and have confidence that things are heading in the right direction.
