Rants and Ramblings: random commentary about culture, media, politics, technology and whatnot.

nyt: now stretchified

It looks like nytimes.com is rolling out a new article template this afternoon. And it’s stretchy.

Old article template | New article template

I’m not really keen on the liquid layout, particularly at wide screen widths that stretch the story column to the point of being difficult to read. And the liquid layout makes it difficult for them to pull off one of their story layouts that I thought was particularly effective when used well, with a photo that spanned the width of the story column.

Also interesting:

• They’ve replaced the drop-down global navigation with a more designed-out (I assume CSS/JS-based) light blue section navigation box, and have moved the leaderboard ad above the nav to avoid potential display conflicts with the two overlapping. The section nav seems a bit buggy for now — it kept turning off when I rolled over the sublinks in Firefox/Mac — but it’s an interesting direction. It’s nice that the user can see all the available links at once, rather than scrolling down a drop-down menu.
   
• They’ve added “Related Topics” links to the bottom of each article with links to site search results for key terms. For example, today’s Stephen Colbert story featured the linked keywords Television | Comedy Central | Colbert, Stephen.