technet

Last week Keith Combs had a guest post by Mitch Ratcliffe which announced a new home page for TechNet users that will streamline the main page offerings to its visitors.

Next Monday, November 15, TechNet will be introducing a new home page. We’ve designed the landing experience to provide IT Pros with more guidance about what news and issues Microsoft has that day. There will be fewer links, as we’re moving past our old “sea of links” approach to the TechNet home—I am sure all our customers know we have lots of resources on TechNet, so it’s no longer necessary to try to show links to all those resources at once.

The big changes will be obvious immediately to frequent visitors. There’s more news and feature content at the top of the page, and we’ve moved the left rail navigation—the list of all the TechCenters and topic centers—to the bottom of the page. This was the result of extensive customer research and real-world feedback in our international network, where some sites have already made this move. We found people always find these links, at the same rate, as when they are at the top of the page. Our reasoning is that TechNet customers know the TechCenters and will find them quickly, wherever they are listed on the page.

Here is what the current page looks like against the redesigned page (screenshot from Mitch’s posting):

technethomepagecurrent
Current

technethomepageredesign
New Design

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/default.aspx