July 2008 - Beijing Olympics cobranded Yahoo!7 Homepage

Yahoo! Homepage

Australia / Yahoo!7 au.yahoo.com New Zealand / Yahoo!Xtra nz.yahoo.com [since redesigned]

The Yahoo! Homepage is the most important page in any international Yahoo! network. It is the first stop for Yahoo! users for all the latest offerings from the entire Yahoo! Network in their region, and so is of paramount importance in terms of content, design, code, accessibility, and uptime.

More Screenshots
  • January 2006 - Yahoo!7
  • August 2006 - Yahoo!7
  • September 2006 - Acer Homepage
  • March 2007 - Yahoo!Xtra
  • July 2008 - Yahoo!7
  • July 2008 - Acer Homepage

The Yahoo! Homepage underwent three seperate redesigns during my time. In all cases my task was to create the homepage HTML, CSS and JavaScript to work across all major browser/OS combinations with the smallest code possible, while maintaining SEO and user accessability. Homepage designs triggered by business mergers naturally had extreme timeline constraints, and our work on delivering the original Yahoo!7 Homepage resulted in my being awarded the Yahoo! Odessey Award for excellence in Engineering.

Once completed the Yahoo! Homepages were an ongoing source of development springing from user-feedback refinements, technological advancements and third-party monetization projects.

The first complete redesign of the Australian homepage was triggered by Yahoo! Australia merging with Channel 7 in 2006, calling for a greater focus on News, Television and Lifestyle content.

The second complete redesign occured globally across all Yahoo! networks late in 2006. Due to our merger with Channel 7 our homepage had special requirements, so we essentially designed and coded from scratch while maintaining the global appearance. From this point onwards a cobrand version was created specifically for the IE7 homepage of all Acer machines sold in Australia.

In 2007 a further merger with Telecom New Zealand's subsidiary ISP 'Xtra' saw us launching a homepage specifically for the New Zealand market, which also took on this modified global design.

In 2008 both Australian and New Zealand homepages underwent another complete redesign to take early advantage of a cutting-edge Yahoo! content management system allowing unprecidented editorial flexibility. The Australian homepage was created and launched in time to incorporate coverage as 'official online broadcaster' of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, while the New Zealand version arrived shortly after my departure from Yahoo!