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Recently the Microsoft Silverlight marketing team called upon Plexipixel to redesign their pre-adoption site. After some intense collaboration and a great partnership with the Microsoft Silverlight marketing team, the Silverlight website (www.microsoft.com/silverlight) was launched on Monday. For those who are unfamiliar:

Silverlight is a powerful development platform for creating engaging, interactive user experiences for web, desktop, and mobile applications when online or offline.

With a wide audience of Designers, Developers, Media BDMs (Business Decision Makers), and ITDMs (Information Technology Decision Makers), we were tasked with a site that looked polished, but had serious substance. Through tight collaboration between our designers and developers, we nailed down a solid user experience flow for four different audiences, while building our concepts into a smooth, robust, and fluid experience.

We built a Silverlight showcase widget that highlights case studies supporting full HD video and an engaging implementation of Deep Zoom that is housed in a site that still serves up content for those without the plug-in. Both the widget and the main site content can be maintained easily from anywhere via our Azure CMS.

In the background, we made sure to enable deep linking within the widget and added robust tracking throughout the site to help the Marketing Team analyze traffic and inform future iterations.

Our team utilized SketchFlow as an interactive prototype tool which helped us get solid feedback early on in the design process and to control unexpected iteration costs during build.

The new site incorporates a multitude of technologies including:

• AJAX
• Silverlight
• Azure
• ASP.NET MVC 2
• IIS Smooth Streaming
• Deep Zoom
• Silverlight Media Framework

We are very excited about the partnership we’ve built with the Silverligtht team and are excited to be an active participant while the technology advances and grows.