The Paper Of Record Goes Long
April 12th, 2006
The New York Times has redesigned their home page.
It weighs in with a whopping 3,000 pixel length. Whoa!
Now, the paper has always had long pages. Their previous design often came in around 2,500 pixels in length:
Even back in 1999, they were about 1,600 pixels:
The New York Times isn’t the only one. The Washington Journal just came out with their new design at 3,250 pixels:
And CNN.com just came in with a somewhat shorter at 2,200 with their new design:
Apparently, the designers at NYTimes.com, WSJ.com, and CNN.com have discovered what we’ve known for years: Users are quite willing to scroll!
April 12th, 2006 at 10:25 am
I also noticed how they are increasing width everytime. It seems they have given up on people using 800×600 screens now.
April 12th, 2006 at 2:30 pm
A lot of designs are now moving to 900 – 1000 pixel widths. That’s becoming more common. It was inevitable, with the increase in higher resolution screens.
April 13th, 2006 at 12:02 pm
Maybe it’s just me, but I certainly dislike really wide webpages with fixed width and with lots of columns. Everywhere I look, websites just seem to get wider and wider, especially online newspapers. Almost like a plague
Most of them use the extra width to add another column (like the New York Times).
Have you measured what impact the number of columns (or width of a webpage) have on user-satisfaction or the scannability of a webpage?
The strange thing is that on paper, every newspaper (in Norway at least) are moving in the oppsite direction, to the tabloid format, ditching the old full format.
April 17th, 2006 at 6:40 pm
I’m in a quandary over screen width – noted as Zephyr did, that all the examples cited had gone wide.
I manage a site for a 2-billion dollar high-tech manufacturer. Our audience is engineers, a group one would expect would all have wide screens. But no — 12% of site visitors are 800-wide!
People in the product groups are forever after me to widen our page and so far I have refused. My arguments are that we want to defend the 12%. But more so, I worry that if I give them more room, they will cram more onto each page without paying enough attention to good design. These are engineers, you know!
My clinching argument is that most other commercial sites use 800-wide but the cases are dwindling.
What are current thoughts on this? Should I crumble and let them design with the width of the Times? I think not — the mission of a news site is different. What do other think?
April 18th, 2006 at 6:58 pm
Less than 30% of our users world wide view our site at 800. We are just this year spreading to 1024 though maintain several content type restrictions.
Our three column layout places all booking/revenue content in the left column, not my favorite for usability but all users can see it and our task tests score well. Our center column is for main content, again, viewable to all users with a width a little less than 600 and our right column is the difference of 1024 and 800 with an aprox width of 220. Only suplimental non revenue generating content is allowed in the right column.
I suggest working with a usability/IA team to create template for your product teams. Expand your content to enhance the experience for the majority of your users without hampering your secondary user group.
April 19th, 2006 at 6:38 am
I wonder how wide layouts will get. From my personal experience, I never maximize the screen when browsing. It would seem that some of these design choices are assuming that happens. Is there a point at which this expansion slows down, in favor of having multiple, full-size windows on the screen?