New MSN.com Homepage

MSN’s homepage has made a change for the better I’d say. While I am not personally much of a MSN user, I would have to agree that the new page is a faster load and it just looks so much crisper and cleaner as well. To me, it would appear that Microsoft is working to change their image across the board. Their work on MSN is simply a reflection of this.

We released the new MSN.com Homepage yesterday to match the new MSN Search release. I work on the Homepage team and wanted to give my thoughts. The great thing about this release was this was driven solely by customer requirements. All we wanted to do was make the page better.

Compared to the old page, the new version is much faster. The page is lighter (about 2/3rds of what the old page was). We have also gone from a table based layout to a CSS powered layout. Granted, we were not able to hit complete compliance with standards. We still have some validation errors (about 130, the last time i checked) in the W3C Validator. We still have a couple of accessibility issues. All we ask for is for people to look at the page as a work in progress.

I have seen some feedback that we should not have declared the doctype as XHTML Strict. If anything, we are closer to HTML 4.01. I agree. But our target is to get to XHTML strict. We realize we are not at a point where we can say we have achieved our goal. We will be working hard to get to that goal. Let us know how we are doing. Where are we slipping up? What do we need to fix? We are listening.

By the way, we also did a new release of the My MSN page today to match the homepage’s lighter theme. You would only get this lighter theme if you had not selected your own theme.