Silverlight is going to be center stage today with the Silverlight player being chosen for providing Web viewing of Obama’s inauguration. That’s great for promotion… but… there’s always a but. A big butt in this case.

So tonight I decided to check the Silverlight site to see what they have to say about the use of SL for the big day tomorrow and also to see what they might say about Moonlight (Mono’s implementation of Silverlight that runs on Linux systems). So I went to the site and at first I thought I had landed on the wrong page on some “close but no cigar” site when you mistype the domain name. Only it was not – this is the real SL site.

First the page didn’t load completely – leaving me with a half filled page that looked like this:

After about 30 seconds or so the rest of the page eventually loaded – very slowly. Not a good first impression.

The next impression though is almost as bad and it’s the overall design of the page. The page is overly wide and doesn’t resize and the right hand side is made up by massive banner ads one which has an obnoxious blinking bit of text (it doesn’t show here but there’s a 6 months free blinking bit of text in the hosting ad). Really? Is that the image Microsoft want Silverlight to have? This looks like shoddy home page design like some sort of hawking site that’s trying to desperately sell advertising.

Seriously though, the oversize ads, on a main page like this is really whino if you ask me. Gotta say this again: Microsoft continues to shoot itself in the foot with these mismatched marketing messages. On the one hand there’s the big time pomp like snatching the inauguration speech for Silverlight which surely involved large sums of unofficial money ( “Presedential Inaugural Committee chooses Silverlight” – right). Oh and the best part is the spelling. Re-read the quote. Presedential? Apparently proofreading is another skill left out in the cold.

And there’s almost nothing Silverlight on this page. The only thing that actually runs SL on this page is the silly menu. Wow, you’re really knocking my socks of with that especially since I can do that with HTML and JavaScript.

Another interesting little fuck up in relation to the Silverlight site: Silverlight.com is apparently not owned by Microsoft and instead some Mac head parked a domain on that site with a prominent Apple logo there. Oh the irony of that. Forethought, who me?

It’s hilarious. If somebody wanted to spoof Microsoft they couldn’t come up with something like this….

This would be funny if it wasn’t so common for Microsoft. Given that Silverlight is one of the key technologies Microsoft is betting on and there surely is no shortage of marketing budget to build a decent front page site, this is really disappointing. Nothing says trust in Microsoft like flaunting bad design into the face of the people who you are supposedly marketing to: Designers. Way to go!