User experience of portal website redesign

<br />From the launch of NetEase's new homepage on October 12, 2006, to the huge structural changes in TOM.COM's new homepage on January 15, 2008, to Tencent's launch of the younger and more fashionable new homepage on March 25, 2008, and then Sina followed Tencent's lead and chose to join the ranks of homepage redesigns on April Fools' Day, April 1. Three months later, on July 1, Sohu, which has always claimed to be "China's largest portal site" with a technology-based approach, also adjusted its homepage. Finally, on July 9, Yahoo China completed the biggest change in its homepage after joining the Alibaba family.
Over the past six months, domestic comprehensive portals have successively adjusted and changed their homepages. Regardless of the purpose of changing strategic intentions, catching up with fashion trends, or other reasons, the portals have one unchanging purpose in revising their homepages, which is to attract more users and retain more users.
The new homepages of the portals after the revision are an improvement compared to the old versions, both in terms of UI and interaction. The new homepages of the portals are moving towards providing better services to users.

1. NetEase’s new homepage was launched on October 12, 2006. It is the earliest comprehensive portal in China to be revised. It has many differences from the homepages of those portals that were revised in 2008. Among these comprehensive portals, NetEase's new homepage is the only one that still remains in the narrow screen era of 800*600 resolution. Other portals have chosen to increase the width of their new homepages. Even though Yahoo China used to allow users to switch between wide and narrow screens, this function was not retained in its new homepage, but the wide screen was directly adopted. Widescreen is the best way to reduce the height of the entire homepage screen while retaining the same content;
2. The biggest change brought about by the redesign of Tencent's homepage is not its fashionable UI or pseudo-wide screen, but the font size increase of the news title on the homepage. Compared with the "small fonts" of NetEase and TOM.COM, Tencent's "large fonts" are more readable. The feature of increasing the font size also became popular among portals that were revised after Tencent. Sina, Sohu, and Yahoo China all increased the font size of news headlines on their pages. However, the font size of Sohu's new homepage is handled very strangely. The same news title has different font sizes, which obviously causes visual confusion.
3. I have never liked the homepages of Sina and Sohu. Besides the fact that their layout makes the content look bloated, another big reason is that all the news titles are underlined, and at a glance the entire screen is filled with underlines. Underlining text with links is the default rendering style of the browser, and is also the default link style in the minds of netizens. But should the link to the news headline on the home page be underlined? When a link is underlined in a text-filled message, it serves as a reminder to users that there is a link to other content. However, the texts on the homepage are basically news headlines, and the texts on the entire homepage are basically links. Underlining does not serve as a reminder for them, but instead brings a certain sense of visual fatigue.
4. Due to the change in TOM's strategy, the new homepage of TOM.COM is undoubtedly the most changed among many portals.

<<: A brief discussion on several situations where MySQL returns Boolean types

>>: A brief discussion on Python's function knowledge