The new Microsoft home page a hide n' seek game - more than twenty clicks to get to the online media room!

This morning, I was poking around for ideas for my column in EContent Magazine. I decided to visit the Microsoft online media room so I went to Google and typed in "microsoft press." Entering a company name and the word "press" almost always works to get me to a company's press page in one click. I ended up with a bunch of hits for the Microsoft publishing business called "Microsoft Press." Back to Google and the search term "microsoft media" and a bunch of hits on "Microsoft Windows Media," so I gave up on using Google and just went to the Microsoft home page.

HOLY COW. Microsoft has a new home page!

Dominating the thing was a HUGE ad for Microsoft Visual Studio 2005. Weird. I wonder why that's so important?

I did not see a link on the home page for the company's online media room. But there were no less than 15 links by Microsoft product name on the homepage! What a bunch of egotistical nonsense. Do Microsoft customers all know the names of their products and only go to the site with product names in mind? Anyway, there were sales related links for developers, businesses and the like, but nothing at all for journalists.

In frustration, I clicked the button About our new home page. Nothing there for the media, although I learned a bunch of stuff about the site redesign: "On December 14 we introduced a new home page for Microsoft.com. The new page incorporates months of research, testing, customer feedback, and refinements. We hope the new page makes it easier to find what you’re looking for on Microsoft.com, and that you find new items of interest along the way." I wonder if they tested the redesign with members of the media. Easier to find? I don't think so. At least not the press pages.

Next I clicked Quick Links which led me to a site map. My eye went to the "About Microsoft" section looking for the press pages. NOTHING.

I'm now something like twenty clicks and several minutes into this hide and seek game and I'm seriously wondering if Microsoft forgot about the press section in the site redesign.

So next I clicked "corporate information" on the site map. I see a bunch of stuff on corporate citizenship, legal, and other stuff and then WOW THERE IT IS– over on the left navigation at the bottom of the list is a link - For Journalists. SUCCESS. Yay.

Attention Microsoft. This redesign may work for other constituents, but you really shouldn’t make journalists jump through hoops to find the pages we need.

Comments

[Dee Rambeau]

excellent audit David. More companies should have their own PR team go through the exact pain you described. Hello out there?!?!?!

[eAgent]

Hi David,

Just a quick comment re: Microsoft's pushing of Visual Studio.

Here's the gig: like an Oracle Implementation ("yeah, we can do it in 6 months for $250,000"... 2 years later and $2.5 million...;-)

As a software developer, we run into this issue daily: .NET/SQL Server vs PHP/mySQL, VisualStudio vs Runtime Revolution.

By pushing VS to users, Microsoft continues to push platform dependency. And that means lots of new Windows users, and existing Windows users continuing to say "but it has more software" than competing platforms.

When I met David McInnis for the first time, he told me he was a windows user, but programmed in PHP. (Actually, he said he didn't care what box he was on, they all look pretty similar once you get into the code).

What machine did he pull out to share PRWeb with me? A Mac OSX laptop. Running Apache, PHP and Linux.

Why? Because it made sense in David's eyes to use a machine that gets the job done, and is virtually virus-free, than to wrangle code inside a Windows machine.

OK, so that was a freakin' lotta' words for a minor post, but you get the point.

More in a bit.
best,
Mark Alan Effinger
www.RichContent.com

[eAgent]

In reference to the multi-click to find stuff issue?

I composed a training piece on navigating PRWeb's site in 2003. It pointed out that it required 2-3 clicks to get to the sign-in process IF you could find the link on the home page (there were two, in what I believe is the smallest possible web font).

David McInnis laughed about it, then fixed the thing in a jiffy by putting the user/pass in the upper left of the home page on PRWeb.com.

Surprise! It actually made a measurable difference in customer engagement.

Never NEVER make the customer work for their info. A great book on that is "Don't Make Me Think" by Steve Krug. Excellent, clear examples of web site makeovers and how to clear the way for customer engagement. A must read.

Great post on a massively big problem.

best,
Mark Alan Effinger
RichContent

[gool]

In reference to the multi-click to find stuff issue?