The sincerest form of flattery
AOL is testing a new homepage design, but a close comparison of a competeing portal will reveal just how much inspiration is necessary to kick AOL into a design update. Not that I particualarly love the new Yahoo portal design, but it’s still a little better than what came before. And probably one of the most worthy solutions to the intentional information overload on those sites.
Speaking of big media companies redesigning their sites. Apparently MTV redesigned their site and launched yesterday, resulting in an immediate service outage. The big story in this though is that MTV had just launched a brand new all flash based site last year. Heavy use of flash seemingly makes sense for what people expect from the MTV brand (loud, active, lots of video). I never visited their site before, but I just find it interesting that they so thoroughly decided to throw a curveball at their users and switch back to a HTML site. You cant please everyone, especially when you are a big name online destination, but seriously, that’s a pretty good problem to have.