New AOL.com looks a lot like Yahoo

Steve Safran April 27th, 2007

2007 is Lost Remote’s Year of the Clean Site. So we salute any and all site redesigns that eliminate clutter and come up with a clean new look. This week, AOL.com rolled out a beta (Do companies like AOL still get to say they’re in beta?) of its latest iteration, and it’s clean and easy to navigate:

However, as LR pal Steph points out, AOL.com now looks mighty similar to Yahoo, which has had this look since last summer:

Now, we don’t get too obsessed with huge design concepts for their own sake around here. After all, LR’s look is pretty spartan and you can probably find blogs that look like us. It’s about the content. Still, when one big corporation rolls out a product that looks this similar to a competitor, it’s worth noting. And AOL agrees that there are similarities. David Liu, senior vice president of the AOL portal site, told internetnews.com “I think in this industry there are a lot of elements of portals that are just going to be similar because people have developed them to a point that they are standards.” But he adds the functionality is where the difference lies - that the different “modules” on the page will be made available for users to have on their own pages. There will be more applications and content modules to come as AOL.com rolls this out over the upcoming months.