Its fairly odd that a design tweak like the New York Times’ website overhaul should be news, particularly since CNN did pretty much the same thing with less fuss a couple of weeks ago. And it took the times nearly a year!
Nerertheless, something interesting is at work – first, sites are now ignoring smaller screens for the first time in years – 1024 pixels wide is becoming the standard. More importantly, by ignoring the low end they can also ignore large screens in a way that 800 pixel wide designs didn’t really cut it. They are bypassing the ridiculous ‘holy grail’ three column CSS layout that geeks with no graphic design sense use in favor of fixed column, paper-like designs used by web designers.
Lastly, with RSS and Ajax, the notion of a page impression is gone – and yet that, rather than just impressions is what is often measured for advertising.
I wonder how long the page impression metric will last?