The New Yahoo Sports

Yahoo’s been working on a site-wide redesign for quite a while now. It began with the new Yahoo! home page and has slowly migrated from there. On the heels of the Fantasy Sports rebrand last fall, the Sports pages were refreshed a few days ago with a completely new look.

Much like ESPN’s recent home page refresh, the new Yahoo! Sports home page is all about photography—big, bold action shots. The new home page follows another trend we’re seeing everywhere these days: 1024px-wide layouts.

There’s more to the redesign than these eye candy first impressions though. In fact, it’s more of a realign than redesign. All the features of the old home page (8.30.06 screen shot | archive.org page) are still present (2.3.07 screen shot): top headlines, today’s scoreboard, custom scoreboards, columnist articles, photos and fantasy info.

The big difference is all the subtle AJAX touches: tabbed browsing for the headlines/rumors/popular module and the scoreboard module, show/hide buttons for fantasy information and columnist links, etc. These enhancements make the main Sports home page and subsequent tent-pole pages even more useful, but where the redesign really achieves is on the scoreboard and live game pages.

Yahoo Sports pages, and the scoreboard/game pages in particular, were known for their light use of graphics and quick-loading content. For the past 5 years or so, Yahoo’s actually been my site of choice for live score tracking for that very reason. Sure, ESPN.com has all the cool tricks like game flow charts, video highlights, etc, but that’s only useful to me after the game. During the game I want quickly updating scores and info, and not much else. The good news is that the redesign did very little to change these live pages. They remain lightweight, easy to use and clutter-free.

All in all, Yahoo! has managed to stay with the times without overusing new technologies. In fact, by waiting until after the rush to use all these new techniques, Yahoo! is better able to make sense of what will truly serve their user base.