| This post was kindly contributed by Key Happenings at support.sas.com - go there to comment and to read the full post. |
Hats are fantastic. It is a real shame that they don’t stay in fashion for very long at any one time. When I was a kid, I got a new dress for Easter every year. My most memorable dresses always included a hat because they were complete outfits. The hat gave the Easter outfit a finished look and said “Today is special.” I looked through boxes of old pictures to find a shot to share with you of a little girl sporting a white straw hat with a green ribbon with yellow daisies. Lucky for all of us, I couldn’t find it fast enough. But this blog isn’t about childhood outfits. It is about the SAS Customer Support Web site. So let me talk about that hat.
Coming soon, we will be changing the header on support.sas.com — giving it a new hat, so to speak. This new hat gives it a more modern look and shares its styling and features with the SAS corporate Web site (www.sas.com). Like all hats, this header has a bigger purpose than looking good and finishing off an outfit.
Before we go any further, let me show you the new header. You’ll start to see this appear over the course of a couple of days, but here’s your first look at it.
The first thing I noticed when I saw it the first time was the orange. The orange draws your attention to two things: the Search button on the right and name of the section of the site in which you are currently viewing pages.
The following numbers correspond to the numbers in the image above and point out other features that I don’t want you to miss.
1 The navigation bar appears at the top of every page on the site. You can use it to jump quickly from one section of the site to the other. The orange highlight serves as a signpost to indicate the section of the site that contains the information you are reading.
You’ll notice that we still have four major sections to the site. However, the Learning Center has been renamed to Training & Bookstore. We didn’t change the content here. We did give it a name that we hope is more descriptive. (We heard many of you say that Learning Center didn’t help you navigate to our training and book sales pages. I hope this helps.)
2 We made it even easier to find the log in feature and to create or update a profile. Just before SAS Global Forum 2010, we added the ability to log in to the site on almost all of our pages. This update makes that easier to see and coordinates with www.sas.com. Note that once you log in to the site, you will be presented with an option to update your profile. Use the update feature to change your password, personal information, and newsletter subscriptions.
3 I’ve already mentioned the orange Search button. Don’t forget about the drop list that allows you to subset your search to a particular section of the support.sas.com site. You can learn more about subsetting searches in this previous post.
4 The toolbar offers a new tool and different access methods for some of the previous tools. You can still easily print a page using the Print feature in the toolbar. The Feedback option is still there (again, added just before SAS Global Forum this year). New to the toolbar in this release is the Share feature. We have moved the E-mail feature into the available sharing options. In addition to e-mail, you can post the page URL to a social bookmarking site, to your Facebook page, your LinkedIn account and to Twitter. We no longer have an option that enables you to quickly bookmark the page in your browser. You can use the browser feature for this task.
We love our new hat and hope that you do to! When you see it, let us know what you think.
| This post was kindly contributed by Key Happenings at support.sas.com - go there to comment and to read the full post. |