The New York Times has redesigned their homepage and website. Anil Dash notes the blog-like style of the new Times layout.
Today, the New York Times launched its site redesign, announced by a prominent editor's note on the homepage. There's a few lessons for bloggers to learn from the redesign, as well as some evidence that the Times itself has been learning from bloggers.
The most prominent change is the new wide page layout, which makes great use of the expanded screen real estate that serious web geeks have available on their displays. A lot has been written about these wider pages recently, but many of the first sites to make smart use of this kind of design have been Movable Type-powered blogs like Gawker Media's Sploid, Paul Scrivens' Whitespace, Kevin Cornell's Bearskinrug, Jason Santa Maria's blog and Khoi Vin's Subtraction. The additional space on the page lets the Times use large and valuable ad units online without compromising the amount of editorial information displayed.
The Times redesign includes a page listing the most blogged stories. If you look at the individual news stories you can see the content is on the left. This is the way many blogs display their content. However, Gawker recently started shifting content to the right on some of their sites -- like Defamer and Valleywag. Even after the redesign there still does not appear to be a list or directory of Times' blogs. Blogspotting writes that more features will come later including an expanded MyTimes feature that will be opened up to the rest of the web. Leonard M. Apcar, the Editor in Chief of NYTimes.com, has a letter to readers about the redesign.
