Yahoo Brief Written Up

Ideas for the brief;

Yahoo needs to be more than a search engine. Although the target audience is for 13-18 I need to ensure that it is still relevant to the current users. 

Starting points is to find out exactly what the age group is interested in, what do they use the internet for. Facebook is one of the most used websites, I need to work out the key factors of Facebook and combine them with the search engine tool of google. The idea of this is that Yahoo will be both interactive, useful for researching and competative. Gaming is a huge part of teenage years, how can I incorporate this culture and the competitiveness of it into the website. 

At present, one of the main downfalls of Yahoo is that it is too overcrowded. There is too much text and too many different areas of the page that overwhelm users when they first log on. Google is incredibly simple, the hope page is the logo and the search engine. All the other categories are in tabs across the top of the web page. Facebook is boarder lining on being too cluttered, but even still, it is easy to navigate around. I need to find out the key topics / search engine subjects / tabs that the target audience uses and then design the website so it has a definitive style. The BBC website has the same overall layout over all the pages, just has a different colour theme for each so they are easily distinguishable. 

I have to make sure that all the colours I use and the typefaces are web safe and appropriate. 

I need to come up with a new strap line for Yahoo which represents the new USP....

"Yahoo; Share, Compete, Communicate"...or something on the lines of this. 

I will have to keep a clear desisgn strategy so that I dont make the brief more complicated that it needs to be. The main priority is to make the new design of the website, so that it is easier to navigate around. Then I need to find ways of keeping the target audience interested and up to date on a day to day basis. The bottom line is that it needs to be more up to date with the demands of that age group.

One of the other main differences between Yahoo and Google is that Google doesn't have advertising and Yahoo Does. Even though facebook does, they do not take up as much of the page as the advertisements on Yahoo do.