Milan Negovan has started a series of posts on his blog where he is analyzing and redesigning the microsoft.com start page. If you've ever had a peek at the microsoft.com site in Firefox, Opera, etc, then you will have noticed that it looks quite a bit different than in IE. But it's not just about cross-browser compatibility. Milan takes the time to walk you through how to design the site right using current web standards. It really is, as he puts it, a web standards showcase. It's not just talk about what you should do to design with current web standards, but you get to take a walk through the entire process - starting with choosing the right DOCTYPE.

From Milan's begining post in the series "Microsoft.com Redesign: A Web Standards Showcase":
For quite some time now I wanted to undertake an ambitious project here, on this site, of redesigning some well known, extremely busy yet poorly designed site to clearly show the benefits of Web Standards (CSS, ECMAScript, XHTML, DOM). I wanted to do it for educational purposes.

Really great stuff, I look forward to Milan's post as he takes apart the current high-traffic page and applies best practices and standards to it, one peice at a time. No tables, separation of content from presentation, and much more. I've said it before, Milan's blog is always worth the read. ASP.NET development from a standards point of view (something I never gave enough thought to before reading Milan's blog). Take a look at Milan's posts so far in the series.

Start reading now before you get too far behind.