Changing That Home Page? Take Baby Steps

A few weeks ago, Yahoo (YHOO) began what may be its biggest overhaul of its home page. But if you are among the roughly 100 million Americans who stop by Yahoo.com every month, the odds are that you haven’t noticed any changes.

That’s because the job of revamping the Web’s most visited portal page is fraught with risk. If even a small fraction of Yahoo’s audience doesn’t like the changes, the company could lose millions of users and millions of dollars in advertising. So Yahoo is introducing changes in small stages and to small segments of its audience at a time, all while soliciting feedback from its users.

You could call it stealth innovation. The company’s goal is to end up several months from now with a completely different, and presumably better, front page–with its audience intact.

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