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A few weeks ago, I tried to switch to the beta of the new My Yahoo! personalized page that aggregates RSS feeds alongside bookmarks, weather etc. It didn’t work. I couldn’t use the new page and couldn’t revert to the old one. Five emails to Yahoo! later, one stock response only, and no joy.
Result: a completely non-working My Yahoo! browser homepage, plus a long loyal Yahoo! user switches homepage to Bloglines for good, and Yahoo! loses the advertising revenue I generated. Webites must delight the user and get back to them fast. How fast must sites reply to maintain customer satisfaction? Read this JupiterResearch report.
Now, a month later, I tried the My Yahoo! page again on the off chance:
We’re sorry, but the new version of My Yahoo! is not yet available in any language other than English. You can return to your current page by following these steps:
… which involves switching from UK English to US English. And, still no email with this resolution from Yahoo!
You might argue that this is fine, the My Yahoo! portal is in beta, and beta services have problems. However, when I tried the Gmail beta in early summer, they replied with a fix in two days. Yahoo! needs to offer at least as good customer service as its competition.

In a former life, I managed a large commercial website. My colleague, Eric Peterson is completely right that choosing the right screen resolution is critical. Go too small and you risk your site appearing boring compared to the opposition, and earning less advertising revenue as the inventory is less visible and/or smaller. It’s equally important that when going larger, site owners should brief their designers to place ‘optional’ items over the potential left/right fold so viewers with older computers can still use the site comfortably without too much horizontal scrolling.
However, now may not be as good a time to go for a full 1024 width as data on screen resolutions alone suggests.
Sidebars are growing in importance. In IE6 users that open ‘history’ or ‘bookmarks’ narrow their screen to close to 800 width. In Mozilla-based browsers, like Firefox, sidebars are usable for content — or for my favourity use, for a translation toolbar — so as screen sizes have increased other tools are competing for the new screen real estate.
Before going wider with a website design, check data on viewable web browser area, not just on system-wide screen resolution.
I should mention this is not my current coverage at JupiterResearch, so do please talk to the experts here if this is of interest.
If you’re planning a site re-design and you’re a client of JupiterResearch, use our inquiry service and send your thoughts and questions to the experts here.