How do you like the new SQL Server TechCenter home page?
If you've visited the SQL Server TechCenter home page before, you'll notice that we've shaken things up a bit in our visual design.
We've added five feature area across the top, and each contains links to content we think you're trying to get to quickly. Things like popular downloads, troubleshooting resources, how-do-I? articles, recent news and getting started. We've also added more blog and forum posts, so you can get a flavor for what's happening with SQL Server across and outside the company, and (hopefully) see something different every time you visit. These items weren't just selected at random - I used data from our web surveys and web metrics to inform the choices you see displayed on the page.
Granted, not everyone is offered a survey when they visit the site, so in the interest of providing a more direct feedback mechanism for each and every page on the site, we're finally re-adding a ratings and comments tool that appears in the upper-right hand corner of the page as a series of five starts. If you hover your mouse over the stars, they'll change to gold and you can then click on a start rating to select what you think of the page (one star = it sucks, five stars = it's great) and you have the opportunity to enter in some free-form text comments.
Why should you bother to tell us what you think of the page?
If you rate the page, I can then collect that data and share it with our design team and my managers to talk about how much you like the page in general. If you enter in comments about what you do and don't like, or suggestions for improvement, I also can then incorporate that feedback into proposed future designs. This data is taken very seriously. So seriously, that for many of us working on the sites, our performance is judged on customer satisfaction.
To set expectations on requests and suggestions, we can't always do everything everyone asks for. Visitors to the site range from beginners to experts and come for a variety of reasons at any given time. That doesn't mean we don't want to hear what you want to see! On the contrary, if enough of you ask for a specific thing (and enough can be variable from a handful to hundreds depending on the page), we'll work on trying to meet that need.
Currently, the ratings tool is only on the TechNet SQL Server home page, but I will be rolling it out site-wide on TechNet and MSDN SQL Server Centers as I work to re-organize the sites in the middle of November. I'll talk more about that in a future post.
So please take the time to rate the page and tell us what you think. As you start to see more site changes in the next few months, I want to make sure your voice is heard and that we're changing the site to meet your needs - not what I, or anybody else here, thinks your needs are.
Cheers!
Chris
