I’ve just updated my home page. Here’s why.

I’ve just made a number of changes to my homepage at thoughtstuff.co.uk. I’ve removed some stuff, added some news things, and re-arranged. I thought that it would be useful to explain why I’ve made those changes.

Weekly Updates

I’ve completely surprised myself by continuing to record weekly updates. Because these often contain the very latest information I’ve moved them further up the page, giving them prominence as the first real item of content after the introduction paragraph. I also fixed an ordering bug with the playlist so that the latest update is always shown.

Hello Microsoft Teams, Bot Framework, Cognitive Services

I’ve taken a look at what I’m blogging about. More and more I’m writing about Microsoft Teams development as well as Skype for Business development. I wanted to reflect that on my home page and I didn’t want people to think that I only talked and worked with Skype for Business. So I’ve brought in logos for both products, side by side, in a way that lets me highlight the most popular blog posts from each category on the home page.

I’m also spending time talking about Bot Framework and Microsoft Cognitive Services. These are an important part of the puzzle when creating great UC applications so I wanted them to have some representation. That’s why I’ve removed the section about the Collections (which I gave a top-level menu item a while ago) and replaced it with a section calling them out specifically. They nicely link to one of the blog categories for anyone wanting to find out more.

Updated Title, Tagline

Finally, after doing all the above I reviewed the site title and tagline and tweaked it to be more inclusive of the other products and technologies I’ve already mentioned. I spent particular time on the tagline: helping developers to make communications a universal feature of all applications. This harks back to something Bill Gates said in 2001 about Microsoft and their communications strategy – if you’ve heard me speak about the Skype for Business development platform then you’ve probably heard me tell the story – and which I think nicely summarises everything that this blog is about.

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There are a few other changes I think I’ll make across the rest of the site, especially if I continue to spend more and more time talking about Microsoft Teams, Bot Framework and Cognitive Services. For instance, I might start to divide up the Collections, Products and Code sections to make it easier to access resources for just the products you are working with. Feedback on the changes above (and anything else) always welcomed via Twitter.