Yahoo embarks on major homepage redesign

Yahoo users can link to their favourite sites through the new homepage

Yahoo users in the US can now personalise their homepage with tie-ins to a range of popular online services from Yahoo and other providers.

The new homepage layout includes a customisable section dubbed 'My Favourites' which appears as icons down the left hand side of the page. The favourites can be linked to popular sites like Facebook, Twitter and eBay, as well as Yahoo's own services such as webmail, news feeds, instant messaging and weather reports.

Hovering over the icons generates a pop-up of that service, offering the latest content as well an advert. Yahoo hopes that the new platform will give users easy access to all their relevant information, and provide targeted ads that should help boost revenue.

The rest of the page has other customisable features allowing users to decide what type of information they want displayed.

Yahoo has already provided some limited customisation through its My Yahoo page, which is similar to iGoogle in that it provides a set of 'panels' that can be added or removed from the homepage.

Yahoo's search engine lags a long way behind Google's, but the Yahoo site is still a hugely popular online destination, attracting in the region of 340 million unique visitors a month.

The new homepage is still in beta, so more changes, tweaks and fine tuning can be expected in the coming months. Users can opt out of the new layout while it remains in beta, but it will become live when the testing is finished.

Trenton Moss, director of web consultancy Webcredible argeud that the new home page is "pretty well designed and aesthetically pleasing", but added that the site fails on customisability.

"It may be easy to add favourites into the left hand navigation, but it is not immediately clear how to delete them and, unlike iGoogle, the rest of the page content - such as the news stories in the middle of the page - is not customisable at all," he said.

The new platform is available to US users from today, and it is expected to be rolled out to the UK later this week and to other countries over the course of the next few weeks.