REDMOND, Wash. — March 15, 2011 — Rose Fechko, senior online marketing manager in charge of Windows Embedded’s website strategy, is on the phone, and she’s clearly tired. But as soon as she starts talking about the new WindowsEmbedded.com, the weariness evaporates and she’s talking animatedly about search, discoverability and user experience. She’s passionate about the site, and she hopes that you will be, too.
WindowsEmbedded.com features a new design and features to make content more discoverable
The new WindowsEmbedded.com launched at the end of February, bringing together content from more than 40 disparate sites and making it easy for people to find. “Before the redesign, WindowsEmbedded.com was intended as the place where business and technical decision-makers went for their information, and developers would go to MSDN for deep-dive technical articles,” she says. “But we found that many developers were searching for deep-dive content on WindowsEmbedded.com. They assumed — understandably — that what they wanted to know would be easy to find on the main website.”
Making content more discoverable was the design philosophy that drove the new site’s development. The site is full of pages that describe and link to external articles, all of them optimized for search engines. However, that is only the beginning. “When you find an article or white paper on WindowsEmbedded.com through a search engine, we’ll give you the context around it,” says Rose. “You’ll see links to related content on forums, wikis, CodePlex, virtual labs and more.”
One of the ways content has been made more discoverable and context-driven is “Top Tasks” navigation for developers. For example, a developer working with Windows Embedded Standard 7 can go to the Windows Embedded Standard 7 Top Tasks page navigation and easily find information relevant to the job at hand.
Rose says that business and technical decision-makers will appreciate the streamlined OS Chooser for specialized devices, and IT professionals will like the new Windows Embedded Live Events finder, which can now locate hundreds of events worldwide.
And there’s even more to come. Rose’s team is creating a powerful search tool for the new site that will enable visitors to search more than a million articles on MSDN and other sites for highly-specific Windows Embedded content, as well as navigate WindowsEmbedded.com entirely by search if they want.
