Everything New is Old Again
In the world of perpetual Beta, "final" never really is. A case is point is the recently launched, segment-savvy home page from the design team at HP.com:
There were many pros and cons chronicled about this "black page" design, but I think it exhibited some nice advanced thinking around how to organize and showcase key content from a home page and make it relevant to different kinds of visitors.
Dell experimented with a similar type of design (sans the black color scheme) and Laura Thomas at Dell had an interesting post about the HP home page design at the time.
So here's the twist: For the moment, for most visitors, the black is gone, and the old home page has been resurfaced:
There's a blog entry explaining the change back, but I think the lesson for all of us in the Web business is that even with unlimited A/B testing, you never know how something will play out until you put it live. And, as Nandini Nayak says there at HP: "This project will always be going on and will never be completely finished." (This sounds exhausting, but true.)
P.S. Speaking of home pages, something is smoking over at the related Voodoo site.
Posted by Martin Hardee at 10:23PM PST
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