Me, October 2000: "But man, the
bread is good."
Me, March 2002: "They bought
two petit baguettes and a pair of croissants and a pain au chocolat. ... They ate their breakfast in relative quiet, drinking the bottled water instead of the champagne, enjoying their last few hours in the Parisian spring air.."
Me, February 2005: "Voila!—your
baguette is piping hot and quite wonderful."
I am back in Paris, and you, dear reader, have no idea how fucking hard it is to observe Passover right now.
If you're looking for me, I'm in New York for a few hours today (and yesterday), mid-step between vacation (out of the continental U.S.) and travel for business (also outside the States), in what seems like perpetual motion. Three trips to three different locations for three-fourths of a four-week span is more tiring than expected. Still fun, though.
So much time and so little to do.... Strike that, reverse it.
Grant Barrett nails it in his
assessment of the New York Times's redesign, in which one major decision was to bust the screen width to 1000 pixels: "Hey, who said we read (or want to read) ANY web site with the browser window filling the whole screen? The only people I know who do that are n00b Windows users."
Mind you, the Times is simply keeping up with the joneses. Many of its peers, from the
Washington Post to the forward-thinking and usability-centric
Cnet to the wise folks at
The Economist, have expanded their screen sizes, largely to capitalize on ad revenue and space above the fold. (Full disclosure: I
commended The Economist on its redesign in this space last fall, albeit with the same point I'm about to make.)
But I'm with Grant on this one. Thanks to years of Mac use, my browser windows are never set to full-size, even when I'm on Windows. Reading studies for years have said 450 pixels is the maximum optimal width for reading text, even if some people train themselves to do otherwise. Most importantly, between 25 and 30 percent of Internet users are still on 800x600 monitors, a significant audience segment.
Yet the push for real estate nudges design ever wider, regardless of the consequences—and, perhaps, the realization that a quarter of the viewing audience won't even see the right-hand side of the screen.
My department at work just finished an audit of two dozen ecommerce websites in our competitive space. Of them, 23 had fixed-width designs between 700 and 800 pixels. The one with full-screen capability stretched its header and footer without altering the content-and-commerce area. Clearly, the optimal usability level is not yet at 1024 pixels in width.
Colleagues at magazine websites have told me their wide-screen ad space performs well, so I won't argue against it. But I won't argue for it, either.
