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Recently, Microsoft's Web site ( http://www.microsoft.com) underwent an overhaul that changed its look, feel and content. Steve Bush, group program manager for the Microsoft.Com Team, described why and how these changes were made.
The site was once a mammoth structure, with image maps and slow graphics downloads. But Bush said the company listened to user comments and "designed a home page that used features of basic HTML for aesthetics, rather than relying on rich, slow-to-download graphics. The result: www.microsoft.com is one-third the size and downloads in one-third the time.
"We tried to keep the total kilobyte size below 40KB, which is about half what most other industry sites have," Bush added. "In addition, we avoided the use of image maps due to their incompatibility with some browsers. We used dynamically sized tables instead of fixed widths so that the screen scales for the size of the browser window, and we avoided frames for usability reasons."
Web designers often overlook the effects of not-so-new browsers on the presentation of a page that's designed with all the latest, greatest bells and whistles. Bush's team took this into account with the redesign of the Microsoft Web site, saying it was "designed to degrade gracefully on browsers that cannot support graphics, or for users who prefer to surf the Web without graphics. All of our graphics contain alternative text, and our navigation does not rely on graphics."
Microsoft used many of the methods described in this article to find a good balance between beauty and bandwidth. "In the last release of microsoft.com, we optimized for both performance and efficient access to [information, including] Microsoft new-product information, customer support and free downloads," Bush said. "We ended up with a very streamlined home page, making it fast and efficient, much as a speed cyclist would do: removing an ounce here and there to achieve maximum performance."
But page design wasn't the only consideration-the hardware used to host this Web site also contributed to its success. Microsoft.com currently runs on 12 four-CPU Pentium-based machines using Windows NT Server 3.51 and Internet Information Server 1.0 in two data centers, according to Bush. There are two T3 connections in one data center and another four T3 connections pulled from around the country in a second.
With its one-two punch of efficient, good-looking design and some hefty hardware, www.microsoft.com is looking better every day. -David W. Boles
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