AltaVista went through a series of divisional consolidations after the fall 99 Live! launch. The site needed to be redesigned to reflect the company's focus on getting back to it's Search roots. Search tools and other utilities that were successful from the portal were to be refreshed with the new visual design.

Approach: Working with the Corporate Creative Director and art direction team, my team of IAs set out to architect the current network of offerings. We worked with Product Marketing to identify the areas of the site that would stay and those areas that were to be decommisioned and shut down. We took inventory of the features and content and developed several sets of wireframes to capture the new Search centric focus.

Components of the Live! portal were aggregated into a Channels area - content and partner centric, all the Find it type tools and Community applications were aggregated together to create the Email and tools area and Shopping was more integrated than it ever had been.

The home page was focused on Search and an attempt was made to let users access the various types and flavors of search that AltaVista had to offer, including a robust Music Search, the popular Image search, the powerful Boolean search (Advanced Search) as well as other search capabilities.

Outcome: While the process of working on this revised site was a success internally, the company finally felt united after having suffered from the divisional cultures from being merged together by Compaq and CMGI, the site was not really a success with the end users and the back to the roots of Search strategy was too late in the life cycle of AV. One exception was the Email and Tools tab.

The revised site launched July 2000.