The region’s largest online platform purchased by Yahoo! back in 2009 have made their second major reconstruction of the homepage since it’s acquisition a year ago. It’s not anything major, but it’s definitely an improvement on the one they had before.
With a couple of tweets and a launch in Cairo and Dubai, the Yahoo! Maktoob team launch their new homepage on the first day of Eid celebrations, pulling in their development and content team on a day almost everyone is spending it with family and friends.
The old design which you can find here contained four major sections: The Day’s Major 6 news items, A Navigational Sidebar containing Maktoob’s 26 sections, Advertisement and a slideshow widget. Overall, not the most informative homepage considering the sheer amount of content Maktoob serve it’s users.
The new design although doesn’t do any major re-branding does a better job at both aligning the Middle Eastern portal of Yahoo! with its international counterpart, and at providing more of the content on a single page they have been expanding ever since it’s start back in 1998.
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The first thing you’ll notice in the new design is the continued simplicity with an increased a focus on news which is showed in the improved ‘Today’s News’ providing 24 scrollable items instead of the 6 provided before.
The design has repositioned the upper weather/prayer time bar to a full-fledged widget inside the fold. They’ve also added an interesting ‘My Favorites’ widgets to allow access to an optional 21 services that provide instant access to content such as your Facebook account from the convenience of your Yahoo! homepage.
All in all the design has definitely improved, although I would have loved to see a more distinct identity displayed in the design other than the small Maktoob under Yahoo! in the logo. I kind of miss the dude carrying the Globe too.
You can see the new Yahoo! Maktoob here. I don’t think there’s any way this can hurt their portal, which we’ll see over the next couple of weeks as they get feedback which we’ll cover as soon as it’s updated. You should see it as the default page come November 22nd.
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