Sleek New Disney Website Planned

Posted on January 2, 2007

The New York Times is reporting that Disney CEO Robert A. Iger plans to unveil a sleek new Disney.com website at the Consumer Electronic Show on January 8th. The new website will be more sleeker, more interactive and contain more online video.

For years Disney's Web sites, which include the popular ESPN.com, ABC.com and Disney.com, have been among the Internet's most visited. In November, the company overall ranked No. 9 among sites visited at home and work, according to Nielsen Netratings, which tracks online traffic.

But critics of the Disney.com, the homepage for a lot of the company's online offerings, say it looks amateurish and is hard to navigate. Disney recently showed off the revamped Web site at a company meeting at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Fla.

Some executives who saw it said it was much improved, with video and interactive features, and was much sleeker than its clumsy predecessor.

The current Disney.com homepage features a map of various destinations called "Neighborhoods" that include Disneyland Destinations, games, shopping, Kids Island, Video Entertainment, Disney Mobile and several other Disney hubs. If the goal is to make the Disney.com homepage sleeker and less child-like replacing this map will be a logical step. Disney.com is located on the Go.com domain which was the search engine Disney ran in a partnership with InfoSeek several years ago. Go.com is still a search engine today but it is now powered by Yahoo.

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