Microsoft's MSN Web site has been around a long time. And some - even some at Microsoft - would say it looks it.

So the company is fixing to launch what it calls a "refresh" of the MSN site built around a redesign of the home page.

A preview of the redesign is going public Wednesday at http://preview.msn.com. The expectation is that it will go live sometime in the first quarter of 2010.

A less cluttered look and fewer links are immediately apparent in the redesigned site.

Portals such as MSN change over the years, but the one thing the big ones consistently try to do is to draw the most number of eyeballs possible. In MSN's case, the company says, that amounted to 600 million unique visitors worldwide in August.

"This is an important, valuable asset for Microsoft," Bob Visse, general manager of MSN Product Management group, said of the site.

Still, while Microsoft had tinkered with MSN over the past few years, it had not redesigned it to this extent in a decade, the company said.

The current look has remained relatively stable for a decade or so.

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