Monday, November 12, 2007 12:17 PM    
 
I’m really pleased to announce the launch of the new Tahiti 1.5.1 design layout updates to the ASP.NET Developer Center and the Learn ASP.NET pages. These pages will continue to evolve over the next few weeks!

ASP.NET new design
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


Eight weeks ago we released a design update (Code Namded: "Tahiti") to the Visual Basic and C# developer centers which was intended to:

  • Highlight lots of new Community features (e.g. Blogs with new RSS control, CodePlex feeds, Community Submitted content, MVP awareness)
  • Bring the How Do I? Video Series, Troubleshooting, Forums, and Downloads into greater focus
  • Drive a more comprehensive “getting Started” section
  • Update webcasts and local Events to feeds

We listened to our internal (TAGM, DevDiv, Subsidiary) and external stakeholders, and rolled out this design with the intent to monitor its performance and iterate as appropriate.
 
Well the time to iterate is now! Traffic is up across the life of all of the pilot sites and the key page task click-through traffic has gone up considerably. We are referring users to CodePlex like never before and our HDI videos and MVP submitted content are rated highly by our users and garner considerable traffic.
 
Based on the actual metrics and additional feedback, we have updated the design to:

  • Tighten up the space used for the top “Featured” components.
  • Move the 4 panel design from the Tobago look & feel, toward the Visual Studio 2008 brand; with fuller alignment coming in Q3.
  • Draw more attention to the How Do I? Videos by dynamically updating as new videos are released and allowing enough space to highlight more than one new video at a time.
  • Allow multiple headlines in the “Featured Resources” section.
  • Remove the forum feeds from the page, which were under-performing, in exchange for the forum listings which they replaced
  • Release v1 of the feedviewer control across all feeds on the homepage (added byline/publish dates)·
  • Find an elegant solution for local headlines.

Bundled with this release is the new events control rolled out on the Visual C# Developer Center in the right rail. We’ve also implemented a geo-detection block for non EN-US, English speaking subsidiaries which over-rides the US events widget.