We've been working on various aspects of the Sitemorse service in order to improve the service and information we provide.

We will be launching a new look and feel to the general side of the site (i.e. those pages accessible without logging in) and will gradually work through the "business" end of the site.  We are always focused on making the interface as easy and consistent as we can so that you don't need long training sessions to become familiar with the interface.  And when we explain things to you in the help screens or inform you of report availability or monitoring alerts via our emails we aim to keep them clear and simple.  As new features and updates come up I will schedule training sessions a refresher sessions to bring you up to speed.

I'm writing this because I (attempted) to read a news article about a preview of Microsoft's research efforts.  No big deal you might think, the usual stuff about touch screens and voice recognition with some unified messaging messages.  Well take a look at the following snippets

The automated receptionist is one of the fruits of a Microsoft Research effort, known as the Situated Interaction project. Other projects the Situated Interaction team is investigating include "multi-participant engagement and dialog models, conversational scene analysis, spatio-temporal trajectory reasoning, and behavioural modelling".

and the ever so slightly more accessible:-

Mundie referred to the demo as an example of "first life" - which he described as "a mirror world of 3D that everybody can participate in constructing and maintaining and which gives us a navigational metaphor that's completely consistent with the world we already live in".

I deliberately used the word accessible there as it is a great example of how what you write can make a website as inaccessible to people as whether you're meeting WCAG.  And writing such gobbledygook affects every single person that uses your site.  So make sure that you don't sprinkle little gems of incomprehensible techno speak in your content.  "Keep it simple, stupid" is a good rule.  You don't have to make your descriptions mono-syllabic and boring but just make sure that, even when you are writing something for a techno savvy audience that you don't slip into the terrible trap that Microsoft's Mr. Mudie did.  It'll drive away your prospects just a quickly as a broken link, slow performance or failing accessibility standards.

I'm not going to rant on about the campaign for plain English and such.  This is just something that hit me today.  I wanted to find something out about something that should have been able to be expressed in relatively simple terms.  Yet I came away with absolutely no idea whatsoever what they were on about.  And instead of coming away with a positive view of what Microsoft are doing, I came away feeling somewhat contemptuous of them - it felt to me as if it was a bunch of guys that needed to show how much cleverer than me they are.  Well guys, what I actually needed was a brief outline of what new things you are working on that may affect me shortly.

Must go, I need to crack on with constructing and maintaining my mirror world of 3D otherwise I wont have my navigational metaphor ready so won't be able to find the sandwich shop at lunchtime.