Yahoo redesign aims to make site more inviting

The right side of the new home page will be devoted to a stack of capsules that Yahoo calls "utilities."

The capsules are devoted to weather, finance, sports, friends' birthdays, video clips and Yahoo's Flickr site for photos. Each one can be programmed to automatically show what a user wants to see, such as the weather in a specific city, information about a certain sports teams or the stocks in an individual's investment portfolio. Any of the utilities can be scrapped.

The left side of the page will list various Yahoo services, although slightly fewer than in the old setup.

Yahoo is planning to display just two ads on the home page. It's an implicit bet that the price that the company can charge for those slots will steadily rise if people become more immersed in the rest of the content on the page.

Investors have been betting Mayer will deliver the turnaround that eluded the three other full-time CEOs that preceded her in the past five years. Yahoo's stock dipped 4 cents to $21.23 in early afternoon trading Wednesday. It has increased 36 percent since Mayer's arrival.