Finally, for the first time in a decade, the folks at Microsoft is giving MSN a major face-lift, in an effort to funnel more people to Bing, the tech giant’s search engine. Dubbed as “one of the best home pages on the web”, the newly-revamped MSN comes in a much neater and less cluttered layout (a clean-looking navigation bar with News, Entertainment, Sports, Money and Lifestyle) as compared to the old MSN homepage, which has 45 clickable links in the top two inches of the page. Besides that, a white background will replace the ‘ugly’ blue background, which doesn’t looks too outstanding to me.
Just like Yahoo!’s redesign three months ago, Microsoft will integrate popular social networking website like Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, Flickr, and Pandora to its new home page. People no longer have to jump from site to site to update their status, tweets or see what their friends are up to; the new home page makes it easy to view and update in-line.
Microsoft executives said that MSN will also embrace the latest customer trends by deeply integrating powerful search from Bing. The Bing integration on the new home page helps people make faster and more informed decisions and easily find the information they want from anywhere on the Web. For instance, local information, like weather, movies, restaurants and traffic, that is easily accessible on Bing will be equally easy to find on MSN.
“Now is the time to clean up the mess on the Web — people need less clutter and less hassle to find what matters most to them,” said Erik Jorgensen, corporate vice president, Microsoft. “Microsoft is uniquely invested in search, media experiences and technical innovation. Combining these assets to deliver our new MSN home page is a tremendous win for customers and advertisers.”
“Customers told us they want the latest information from their favorite sources, their friends and the breadth of the Web — and the new MSN home page delivers via a fresh new look and new features,” Jorgensen said. “Today is an important transformation for MSN, and it’s just the beginning.”
The new home page will deliver comprehensive local information from the new MSN local information offering, MSN Local Edition, also unveiled today. You can preview the new at http://preview.msn.com. Microsoft said it will become widely available to U.S. customers early next year.
Evolution of MSN Home Page (1996-today)
1996
1999
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2002
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2006
2009
2010 (as I’ve mentioned above, the new MSN home page will be available early next year. What you see in preview.msn.com is just a preview version.)