14 DAY TRIAL // Though clearly understated by the ruling web elite hanging around Twitter, and maybe Buzz now, or whatever it’s the hot new service de jour, question and answers sites are very, very popular with the vast majority of Internet users. Yahoo Answers is the biggest out there and the number of people using it is clearly impressive, but as with several other Yahoo proprieties, it was beginning to look a bit long in the tooth and was in need of a freshen-up which Yahoo decided it was to time to provide.
"The next time you log into Yahoo! Answers you may notice things look a little bit different. We’re rolling out a new homepage and navigation over the next few days. Don’t worry: if you don’t see the new changes just yet, you will soon. We’ve made quite a few changes to the homepage," the announcement on the Yahoo Answers blog read.
Besides the visual changes and enhancements, which we'll get to in a bit, Yahoo says it has done some work under the hood as well. "This release doesn’t just include cosmetic changes—we also included quite a few backend bug fixes, as well as a few feature requests, like updating the category leaderboards much more regularly. Starting today, category leaderboards will update on a daily basis instead of weekly," the post also read.
The new category menu, one of the most noticeable changes, will greet you from the homepage but will be visible on all Yahoo Answers pages. There are four main tabs Home, Browse Categories, My Activity and About, which are all pretty much self-explanatory.
The second biggest change is moving the categories list from the left sidebar and integrate it in the Browse Categories tab as a popup menu. This clears up some space on the homepage and it also makes the categories available anywhere else on Yahoo Answers. Finally, the site also got a bit of spruce up by toning down all the green hues and adding a light blue background.
