sharon.elkins.blog

if you make it all the way through this long post – kudos!   let me know what you think - are we focusing on the right areas as we start “moving in” to our new site?  feel free to ping me about this and anything else you’d like to see happen on the site.  happy reading!  - cheers . s

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THE OFFICIAL SITE UPDATE BEGINS HERE

our new website is just over a month old and we’re already seeing an improvement in our traffic and feedback.  if you haven’t had a chance to check out the new site yet – ACK! please take a few minutes, click around and let me know what you think. 

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data - looking at our volume metrics from january and february - we’ve had a nice lift across the board since the launch on february 4^th. 

keep in mind when reviewing these numbers that in january the site was four times bigger than it is today – and the month of february has three less days. 

it’s nice to see our Visitors Who Visited More Than Once is up 1.25% and Visits Average per Day is up an impressive 13.60%.

february’s Top-10 Most Visited Pages changed – something we haven’t seen this fiscal year.  it is good to see Learn and Development make the Top-10 … but, I am concerned the TFS Readme page dropped off the list.  i will add the TFS Readme page to our Homepage - Popular Resources section and keep an eye on traffic patterns and make further adjustments as needed.

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activity - in february, the site’s focus was on baking in feedback received from our MVPs and customers – along with executing a weekly publishing cycle that keeps the Homepage, Learn and Download areas of the site fresh.  we also added some cool new content to the site.

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what’s next? – while I continue to bake in feedback on a weekly basis, here is a quick snapshot of the projects we’re also tackling these next couple months:

• social media: how do we bake in a richer experience with our blogs and our tweets? we need to surface up information hidden in our blogs & tweets in a way that customers can quickly find it and engage.
• video portfolio – gallery: while we have a lot of videos – what you see on the site today is not a comprehensive representation.  we have gaps of information that we need to fill. the goal is to offer an all-up video experience that touches on all product cycle scenarios from the beginner to advance level of expertise.
• process templates: this popular area of our site needs a complete overhaul to help surface our offering of these valuable tools not only developed by us – but by our community.  we need to do a better job offering a more dynamic experience in this area. 

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… after a few months of gathering feedback, auditing content, reviewing mockups, removing irrelevant pages, mining for fresh information, writing and editing pages … i am happy to announce team system has a new web site!

what you see today is a solid framework for what’s to come. over the next few months the site will morph as we start moving in.

the goals for this first phase was simply to clean up what we had and introduce a flow of information that is easily discoverable.  there is so much going on in the team system world – the old web site wasn’t doing its part in helping get information to our customers.

when you look at just the numbers – the site downsized significantly in page count.  there is much goodness for having a lean site. 

a special shout out of thanks to my partner neil carter on the msdn team and to the team system web council. without these folks, the site wouldn’t be where it’s at today. 

please take a few minutes and click around the new team system site.

let me know what you think.  as we begin to gain traction – baking in your feedback is critical to the ultimate success of the site. 

cheers . s

your feedback and suggestions are critical to the ongoing quest of providing a high-quality online experience. success to me is – you finding relevant information and engaging quickly and easily. if along the way you learn or find something new – that’s even better!

let me know what you think about the web site. i am keen on hearing any and all suggestions you have.  cheers . s

“Community: a gathering of like minded people” - a quote scribbled on my whiteboard by a co-worker of mine

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just launched a revised “Community” section on the site – what do you think?

behind the scenes …

because VSTS is comprised of a variety of products used by a variety of people doing a variety of things – our community is big, diverse and multi-dimensional.  the goal of this new section is to bubble up all the goodness happening across the community.

featured community section (up top)

• what do you think about only calling out a couple folks as featured bloggers ?  the goal here is to help navigate through our vast number of blogs and if you only had 5 or 10 minutes to spare to read one – you have a handful to choose from.

back story:  our featured bloggers are identified in part due to the number of posts they do and the number page views they get.  there just may be an upset in a couple months :)  in a couple areas of our team we have some bloggers really rocking the blog space now and page views are creeping up.

• do you care about what the top most viewed blogs are ?
• a late add to the page is “Community Reads” – which i personally think is a great addition requested by someone from our web council. does knowing what the community is reading help you stay informed ?

community videos (in the middle)

• what type of videos do you want (or have time) to watch? product demos, how did we do it?, why did we do it?, event sessions, … ?
• who do you want the videos to come from … from microsoft, from our MVPs, from the User Groups, from events, from a shaky handy cam user interviewing his/her co-workers, from … ?  

MVPs – community websites – forums (bottom section)

• is this link “over load”? – or do you think having these on hand will help you navigate to information?
• and for those visual geeks like me … do you like the fancy bullets or the regular bullets for link lists?
• do you want more help navigating through our forums?

can’t wait to hear what you think!  i hope you like it -- and -- if you don’t, please let me know so i can make this page really zing.  cheers . s

welcome to my blog! - a place where i will share with you what's going on behind the scenes of the vsts site, bubble up news and information and relentlessly ask for feedback and suggestions on how to improve the visual studio team system web site. 

first an update.  while you haven’t seen much change on the site (yet) - that has been purposeful as the site isn’t in need of Band-Aids – it needs a complete overhaul.   we’ve recently completed a few key milestones on our path to a new and improved site launching in january 2009 (woot!)

site audit.  this was a tricky and long "are we there yet?" adventure through pages that served up visual surprises, hidden nuggets of information, garbled code ... no cohesiveness.  net, the site is on a diet with a goal weight of 100 pages down from 395.  this is goodness as it means the search engines will have fewer pages to chew through to bring back relevant results – as well as more succinct pages for our customers. 

new site framework and layouts.  customers tell us they can’t find information.  the worst thing a webhead like me can hear.  while content is king - if you can't find it - it doesn't matter.  we are fixing that by rebuilding the primary and secondary navigation framework, and addressing information architecture issues throughout.  broken paths = lost customers = sad web manager.  

here is an illustration of the new framework.  the goal is to surface up key scenarios within a persistence navigation throughout that is ... well ... predictable.   let me know what you think ^^)  cheers . s