Microsoft.com is not a website

The new Microsoft.com is a success. There has been much praise about its responsiveness, its simplicity and its clarity. Well-deserved praise I must say, as the design led by Trent Walton’s agency Paravel is very well-thought.

Problem is: it’s not a website. It’s a portal.

Considering it’s a single page (and I’ve done a couple myself), I can hardly call it a website. Wikipedia itself calls a website a set of related web pages.

Definitions aside, I have yet to find a link on MS.com that ends up on a page using the same layout. I’ve tried the navigation menu, the big slides, the footer links… I wasn’t able to stay on the same website (which would have turned it in one actually).

Clearly, the role of a navigation menu is to provide hierarchy, offering a snapshot of the sitemap, but most of all act as a guide to refer to throughout our navigation. What’s the point in providing a menu when actually using it makes it suddenly disappear?

Here are the 2 options:

• build a full-scale Microsoft website that is consistent throughout its products
• make Microsoft.com look like what it really is: a portal

Obviously, the latter is not recommended, considering how portals are outdated and not user-friendly, and considering the great design MS can now work with as a solid base. So, I’ll wait for a complete rebuild of their website(s). And I secretly hope it’s already in the pipeline.

The Microsoft.com redesign currently looks like a great step forward, but it’s not as long as it remains half-baked as it is. And providing a ‘Feedback’ button may be a hint of what not to do.