How Wide Can a Website Be?

The New York Times has redesigned it's website. It looks like the cross between a blog and the International Herald Tribune and that's good. Mainly cause the IHT has had one of the best designed sites on the web for years, but hey it's nice to see "MSM" acknowledging just who runs the internet news game too. More importantly navigation is a breeze, find things is no problem. Well you can't find the write up of today's Met's game in the sports section only on the front page, but I'll assume that's a glitch.

There is one real problem with it though, although I'm not sure it's their's or mine. The freaking thing is too wide, 975 pixels apparently. Web designers have been trying to grab all these extra pixels for years now, and with the Times it looks like management caved in to them in order to "take advantage of the larger monitors now used by the vast majority of our readers" and that's a mistake. Now I'm not some user bitching cause I have an antiquated machine with a tiny monitor, I'm actually a total resolution whore, I want as many pixels as possible, crammed as closely as possible. So much so that last I looked my 14" 1600×1200 pixel laptop was actually higher than anything then on the market, so much for progress...

So I have one of these larger monitors they are talking about, but I can't see all the content on the Times site, it's getting cut off on the right. Why? Well just because I have a large monitor, doesn't mean I want to give it all over to the New York Times. There are other things on my screen and I like them there. Designer's have always had a hard time grasping this, so it's always taken the clients to reality check their arrogance. But if there is any class that can best designers in arrogance hands down it's a TImes staff member, and now we have a deadly combo.

Except it looks like the joke might just be on them, cause just what is getting cut off in my browser window? Nothing I care about, no, what's getting cut off is all the ads! Maybe this wide site thing isn't so bad after all...