MSN Homepage changes

MSN.com are getting the updates ball rolling early this year with their adoption of the new, cleaner layout for their homepage, previewed last November. The new layout, even when previewed, added some great functionality for MSN members to stay in touch via their social networks, without needing to leave the MSN homepage.

Facebook and Twitter feeds have been added that synchronise with existing accounts to keep users up to date with the latest news. A Bing search box has been included as have many latest news feeds that either link the MSN pages or to Bing searches for those subjects.

One change from the preview homepage to the live site is the popular searches, again a new feature related directly to Bing, has moved to a more prominent position at the top of the page. This is hardly surprising as the redesign seems in part to be aiming to drive yet more MSN users on to the search engine. Currently around 50% of Bing’s users are forwarded directly from MSN and the changes to the MSN Homepage seem aimed directly at improving this rate.

Another factor in these changes is in improving the usability of the MSN homepage, something has not been a major issue for the site since the early days of MSN. The extra search features will serve to increase traffic through MSN but it may be that the day of the portal truly is dead. Certainly the site will develop, as currently the new layout is only available to American users, the GB and European portals are still showing the older layout and the localisation functionality of the American portal seems not to be implemented.

SEO Junkies are dedicated to getting your company further up the Search Engine Results pages. In order to achieve this we can tailor a Search Marketing campaign to your business or even train you staff in the basics of creating and maintaining an SEO friendly website.