In its first major redesign in two years, Yahoo announced plans to makeover several popular front-door sections of its Web site including the homepage over the next few months. The company plans to streamline the design of Yahoo.com giving users what matters most to them no matter where they ‘live’ on the Web. The company plans to:

• add more bells and whistles like widgets for increased personalization
• provide users with a dashboard area (off to the left) that will let users add previews of their favorite Yahoo and non-Yahoo services such as eBay, Gmail, AOL Mail, weather, and local events without leaving Yahoo’s main page
• open up it’s music section to rival services like iTunes and Amazon

“The Web has evolved to keep us in constant communication, but this also means we are continually receiving emails, text messages, RSS feeds, tweets and IMs. Keeping up can be a struggle.” The new Yahoo home page features a tab on the left hand column of the page with sophisticated links to the user’s 10 or 20 favorite sites. It functions as an alternative to navigation methods like bookmarks, link bars or browser tabs. In its simplest sense, Yahoo is blending the broadcast, editorially-controlled view that Yahoo.com has long offered with the personalized, self-selected view of information that the company’s MyYahoo service has long offered. It mixes things users know they want, with the serendipitous or unexpected. said Tapan Bhat, SVP, Yahoo.

The redesign is being tested on a small group of invited users locally and internationally in the U.K., France, and India. The site boasts 500 million monthly users globally.