Susan Suarez

Del.icio.us is testing a new redesign and renaming itself, without the dots…to just plain Delicious. The popular bookmarking service will stay the same but since the dots were confusing (I agree they were and especially for newcomers…), they’ve finally decided to switch over and that wasn’t the only change. They’ve also decided to adopt the use of .com instead of their current .us extension. Further proving that .com still rules above other domain extensions. Other than BoingBoing.net and .org or .gov domain users, there aren’t too many high profile sites not using .com.

There are only a limited amount of invitations available to get a sneak peak of the new delicious site which is currently under-going thorough testing.

Their navigation system is to improve by organizing the site 3 easy main sections: Bookmarks, People and Tags.

The new tag bar is pretty nifty to allow you to quickly navigate your bookmarks by tags and allows the ability to sort your tags in a variety of ways, such as popularity including an action box with a list of commonly used actions for the current page.

This is a neat enhancement I haven’t seen before – it allows the ability to quickly view a fellow users bookmark collection of top ten tags within the sidebar, giving you a quick assessment of other users profiles and what they tag.

I’m definitely looking forward to the new Delicious look and technology as it’s a currently minimal site especially in comparison to the other services out there.

Why should you care about the site redesign?

Delicious can bring many visitors to your website by getting on the popular or hotlist page.  When the new design goes live, Yahoo will more than likely promote the new design to many online journals/sites/websites and you will want to be on that front page.  Even being on the front page now would yield good traffic since they are actively contacting sites about testing the design.

How to get on the popular or hotlist page?

• Complete your submission thoroughly – Don’t be too quick to submit a short description and tag.  Take the time to add a good description and relevant tags to help others find your story to increase the chances of bookmarking it.
• Popular Tags Rule - Take a look at the tag cloud to determine what users like or dislike.
• Include Bookmarking Buttons – I use AddThis for bookmarking (in sidebar) but if you are not using any bookmarking buttons, try using Delicious buttons on your website to gain votes for your popular page.