14 DAY TRIAL // AOL finally became a publicly traded, independent company earlier today when its shares became officially available on the NYSE. And, as its CEO, Tim Armstrong, rang the opening bell at the stock market, the company's homepage, Aol.com, introduced the new design revealed a couple of weeks ago. It's not much of a change visually, but the symbolism behind the changes should be in line with the new company's goals.
“AOL is proud to be trading on the most prestigious Exchange in the world and we hope to follow the many successful companies before us who have opened on the NYSE,” Tim Armstrong, AOL’s chairman and CEO, said. “As an independent company with a recognized global Internet brand, we will be competing for the future of content, communications and advertising and that is a very exciting and significant opportunity.”
The new homepage looks pretty much the same as the old one and the layout is rather similar. The things that are impossible to miss, though, are the new selectable themes, which adorn the site with backgrounds ranging from goldfish, cuddly, blue monsters, butterflies to all manners of abstract images. Along with the background, the color theme of the site changes to match.
But there's more to the new design than what is obvious at first. In line with the new company motto, users can customize some of the content they get on the page. There is also a new News Feed tab, which serves as an online feed reader already filled with several news sources.
This of course is just a first small step towards achieving what its CEO set out to do, namely turn the company into a content powerhouse and trim off the unessential propriety. First things first, though, the company just started trading and it has to ensure that it doesn't take too much of a beating on the stock market. So far, the share price is going down after shooting up in the early hours and is currently trading at slightly above $23 per share adding up to a market cap of $2.47 billion, just below the $2.5 it started with.
