Website design newsletter
Every month we publish interesting news articles relating to website design, search engine trends and other exciting changes happening online.
January 2007
Contents
Yahoo announces much-needed shake-up
Free hosting for collaborative wikipedia style websites
Global online shopping confidence grows
Yahoo announces much-needed shake-up
January 2007
Yahoo Inc. announced its biggest executive shake-up in more than five years. While Google's market value has climbed by 17% during 2006 to $149 billion, Yahoo's has shrunk by 30% to $37 billion.
In the overhaul announcement, Yahoo vowed to rein in a sometimes-rambling product expansion that has bogged down its earnings growth and threatened its position as the Internet's most popular site as more buzz built up around upstarts like MySpace and YouTube.
The streamlining will bunch Yahoo's disparate operations into three core groups focused on its Web site's audience, advertising network and technology.
Yahoo has been struggling most of this year as Internet search leader Google Inc. proved far more proficient at delivering ads that captured the attention of Web surfers. Yahoo says it's in the process of introducing significant improvements to its system that will produce higher advertising commissions next year.
To add to Yahoo's misery, Google recently bought YouTube, the Internet's hottest video site, for $1.76 billion in a deal that many analysts expect to yield even more lucrative advertising opportunities.
Meanwhile, Yahoo has been frustrated in its attempts to buy Facebook.com, the second biggest social networking site behind News Corp.'s MySpace.
Source: www.cnn.com
Free hosting for collaborative wikipedia style websites
January 2007
The founder of Wikipedia announced that he planned to give more online power to the people by providing free software and hosting services for collaborative websites.
Jimmy Wales said a free service dubbed OpenServing.com "would go live shortly" to give anyone the ability to build websites devoted to shared interests. OpenServing computers would host the websites.
Website creators will get to keep all the advertising revenues "providing a whole new world of entrepreneurial business models to bloggers and website owners," according to a release from Wales's company Wikia.
The websites would be built as "wikis," which means their content could be edited or changed by visitors in the communal style used at Wikipedia, a popular, multi-language online encyclopaedia refined by those that use it.
Source: www.cnn.com
Global online shopping confidence grows
January 2007
Amazon reported this Christmas season was its best ever in terms of volume sales.
Amazon said Monday, Dec. 11 was its busiest day ever with over 4 million items sold compared to 3.6 million items a year ago.
Although it didn't release data on meeting specific delivery dates, Amazon claimed it shipped more than 99 percent of its orders in time to meet Christmas deadlines worldwide.
On the peak day, Amazon shipped some 3.4 million units worldwide (to over 200 countries).
"If you look at overall trends, more and more people are comfortable buying online, and in e-commerce Amazon has a very strong leadership position," Tim Bajarin, analyst with Creative Strategies, told internetnews.com.
"Their biggest challenge going forward is finding ways to attract new customers while maintaining the ones they have. They are facing more competitive challenges than ever before; for example, Barnes & Noble is getting stronger in online book sales."
Source: www.internetnews.com
