Microsoft Frontpage - decision, confusion or clarity?

After the last article on Adobe's Dreamweaver's page, I decided to look at similar pages. In the software world there are many similar products and product that are sold to similar market base. The one advantage software marketing has is the ease of gathering competitive and useful information. The obvious page authoring and design competitors are: Microsoft Frontpage, Nvu (open source), Netscape Composer. From there the list goes down to really small programs. But in this line up, there is an interesting twist. Microsoft FrontPage is not really a contender. First of all, the program is being discontinued. But not really, it is actually being "split" into two programs: Share Point Designer and Expression Web. But here lies the twist, the main FrontPage page has this "decide what you need" graphics. This is something rarely seen on the web. Although it does explain that this product is actually becoming two. For the professional web designer not using Share Point, this is probably a confusing explanation.

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Microsoft FrontPage splitting into two
So let's get back to our original point. Clarity, Focus and Relevance is a little fuzzy at this point. Clarity I tried to define as message divided into smaller sections, using standard terms, relevant to each other, focus on a single idea, amplify in later sections. But here, there is a full article, in small sections on how the FrontPage product is divided. Overall, this is an OK way to show what happened to a tool that 'migrates'. But you have to think and explore. Theoretically, the message is clear. But it could have been more clear if there were more explanations on each product, or differentiation between the two. For an old page designer, it seemed to me that "Expression" was the "orphaned" product. Sometimes things seem a little like they really are. For some reason, just like what happened with Photoshop about 10 years ago, Adobe has focused very strongly on the professional designer. I think here they won over Microsoft. If you want to know why, take a look at the description of each product. If you need more info, both products are downloadable for a trial period. Maybe here we can also do a comparison. But for me, the message from Adobe is a little more convincing.

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There is another point here that needs expanding. For fairness sake, the Microsoft FrontPage page is a little dated. It has been there probably since mid 2006. This was a little early for AJAX with the tabs, collapsible 'accordion' ads and sections and other nice GUI tricks. (These make a page look like a PC program, and this is the message behind the new updates to these new tools). But clarity is not a matter of layout or graphics. In the FrontPage article there is a "Find more information on the new Microsoft Web authoring tools" section with links to the new products, that should have been at the top somewhere. Maybe even accessible from the graphics. The section on "Which tool is for you?" should have more on features. It looks to me like the Share Point Designer, or actually the Share Point product manager won out over the Expression product manager. Or more likely, neither one thought enough about the implication of a little more information for each product.
--- Well, it's time to move on. Live, observe and learn. I would like to look at the other pages, Nvu and Netscape Composer. These are simpler 'free' tools, but still draw a crowd and useful in designing pages which are more hand coded than WYSIWYG designed. Looking at them has another purpose: what do you do with something free that does not have a marketing budget? Do you just put it "out there" - 'if we build it they will come' style? That has been the "open source" marketing argument for a long time. Let's see if it works? Where is it done well? What can be learned? and finally, how we do it when we need it (don't laugh, even companies with cash in the bank don't run to advertise too quickly.)

Clarity, Focus and Relevance for Product Manager (and Marketers)

When we develop a message, trying to make sure clarity, focus and relevance are there is not hard. Usually I start out by prioritizing the message components. Let's take the Adobe Dreamweaver's example, first we separate the whole message into 'chunks' or 'elements'.

Dreamweaver's page has sections for:

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• What's new: Develop Websites and applications; Reasons to Upgrade


• Product Overview: Whats Dreamweaver CS3?; Get the details


• Feature Tour: Spry framework for AJAX & details; Photoshop CS3 integration; Compatibility Check; CSS Advisor; CSS layouts; Manage CSS; Device Central CS3; Bridge CS3


• Product Selector: Design; Web; Photography; Video


• News: What's new in Dreamweaver CS3; What's new in Device Central CS3; Best Practices of CSS; Dreamweaver Developer Toolbox

Notice that the category (tab) divisions are fairly standard software terms. These are useful in the message of each tab's content. Using well understood and accepted terms is one trick of clarity in a message. 'What's New?' is a clear term and will not confuse most readers. Using tab sections also helps in focusing the message. When a writer wants to divide a message into sections, standard divisions, similarity in context and relevance help in making the message clear. Readers don't need to figure anything out, they know and understand the divisions, all they need to see in the content in each division.

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Once a reader is inside each 'tab' section, there are further sub-sections. This techniques of hierarchical division of text is standard in web content. In the "What's New?" section, we see: "Develop Websites and Applications" and "Reasons to Upgrade". Again these headings are simple and can also be considered industry standard. They are standard terms for software application communication, but not all users are completely familiar with them. But their simplicity helps in making the terms clear. The first section has one short paragraph explaining: '...components for building dynamic user interfaces, and intelligent integration...' with the terms of each feature clearly deliniated. In the next section we simply see a list of features. These are less clear without a full sentence, but are still clear because they highlight a few things. Notice also that each topic is by itself. This helps in not packing too many idead into one sentence, bullet or paragraph. When writing content for the web, people expect ideas in small increments of text. Since there is so much information, we don't want to have it slow... - this is clearly different than writing for a book or a printed brochure.

OK, let's recap a few points for clarity of a message:

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• Divide the message into sections.


• Use standard terms and concepts.


• Make the sections relevant to each other.


• Focus on one or two messages in each section.


• Give more information if needed further on, don't overstuff the sections.


• Use simple sturctures, paragraphs, lists, diagrams, images to quickly say something.

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Well, that's all for the Adobe Dreamweaver page for now. A good exercise will be to do the same analysis with other similar product. Dreamweaver is a product targeted at professional designers and web authors. Microsoft, Oracle, Intuit, Symantec, Borland and other companies have products which sell into this or similar space. It would be interesting to compare how each company gets their product message across. This could be in the case of an upgrade version (like this example) or in other situations.