Mohit Kukreja

Today is an exciting day for our team at MSN because we unveiled the most significant redesign our MSN.com homepage has seen in over a decade. We spent thousands of hours talking with customers; testing hundreds of ideas; experimenting around the world and carefully evaluating what our users want, and don’t want - to deliver a homepage that is designed to be the best homepage on the Web. We hope you’ll agree.

In our conversations with customers, we consistently heard that you want less clutter, easier access to the information & services you care about, and powerful search integration to help you make decisions faster. So, we started from scratch to cut the clutter on our homepage and reduced the amount of links by 50%. There’s also a simplified navigation across news, entertainment, sports, money, and lifestyle that lets you drill into information topics that interest you, without being overwhelming. Local information from your neighborhood is important to you and so is high quality, in-line video – so we offer both, right on the homepage. And, you told us you want the latest information not only from your favorite sources, but also from your friends, and the breadth of the Web – so we now offer convenient access to Facebook, Twitter, & Windows Live services and the most powerful search experience on the Web from Bing, empowering you to make more informed, faster decisions. And this is just the beginning - keep visiting our blog for more MSN news in the coming weeks.

The simple, uncluttered environment of our new homepage also affords an advertising opportunity, unlike anything we’ve offered before. Advertisers can create a conversation with customers through engaging, high-performing, rich-media advertising campaigns and know their message will resonate. Advertisers who have seen early previews of the site love the new design and the new ad opportunities have been well received. You’ll see more on this in the coming months.

Original Blogpost

Expert Blogs is a blogging solution tailored for MSN editors and freelancers to provide content to all the various channels on MSN, for example money, autos, lifestyle etc.  It makes it really easy and cheap for the bloggers and channels to publish content. The solution components for displaying and promoting the content, as well as administrative interfaces for creating and managing blogs, and creating the posts within the blogs. Its created on a .NET Architecture with MS SQL databases as the backend.

Our Blog page views are over millions of pages per day mark in less than a few months of it being released.

Some links to examples of the blogs already published:

MSN Money: Market Dispatch
MSN Lifestyle: Simply Chic Blog
MSN Real Estate: Listed

Preview of Listed Blog:


Preview of Simply Chic Blog:

My second project as an intern in microsoft was to create a mobile version of fox sports NASCAR, for MSN mobile.

This site had many challenges, like reading the feeds for leadership and scoreboards for the sports feed from foxsports and present it in a nice and clear format for a variety of cellphones screens.

The following is our final design and site:
(It's an iframe, you can click around within the site,
Click on the leaderboard, Schedule and Standings links for current scores)

I worked with MSN Mobile team as a developer for my first 6 months at Microsoft and also as an intern from USC in summer of 2007. My first project as an intern was to create a mobile version of Fox Sports professional golfing site PGA, for MSN Mobile.

The big challenge in creating a mobile site comes from the different screen width's and the page size handling capabilities of different cell phones. Some cheap cell phones like Motorola Slivr or Razr have a screen size of 128 pixels and some higher end phones like blackberry's and iphone etc. have over 320px. So, we needed to provide decent enough experience on the lower end phones for the users to understand the content. And also provide the higher end cellphones with a richer experience which they could handle.

The following is our final design and site:
(It's an iframe, you can click around within the site,
Click on the leaderboard and schedule links for current scores)

I decided to create a site for blogging and mostly out of an intent to get out there and do a small project :)

Everyone told me to adopt one of the already existing blogging projects our there (wordpress etc.) But i wanted to create my own solution and have a site that i designed and brought up from scratch.

As for user comments and profiles i decided to use facebook connect. It's an easy way for me to have all my friends leave me messages as themselves and not anonymous comments.

Something technical:
This site consists of a SQL MS Server backend which talks to the frontend to show you all this data that is being presented out here.

Please feel free to leave me feedback either by comments on the site or using any of the options on the "Contact Me" TAB.

Enjoy mkukreja.com, Thanks for visiting my website.