CNET News.com Turns 7

dmehus writes "Just as Google celebrated its 5th birthday last week, which was covered by Slashdot, I thought it would be equally appropriate to point out that tech news darling CNET News.com celebrated its 7th birthday this past week. To mark that occasion, its Editor-in-Chief Jai Singh wrote an article, in which he reflects on their founding slogan of 'Tech News First' and their commitment to that going forward. He also announces a brand new redesign that was unveiled yesterday. To that I'd add, here's to another seven more! Thoughts or opinions, anyone?"

Comments

Congrats!

[stev3]

I've learned to take CNets news with a grain of salt, since many times they just seem to editorialize stories and add in useless comments etc.

To be in business 7 years is a great accomplishment though, and my congratulations go out to them.

Fixed-width layouts are good for text-heavy sites

[starvingartist12]

A static/fixed width layout isn't a bad thing, depending on when it's used. And I'm sure the people at CNet thought about the pros and cons of a liquid layout in their design process.

For a text-heavy site such as News.com, a fixed-width layout is very ideal. If you happen to have a very high resolution, the text in a liquid/expanding design would run past the optimum line length of about 60 characters or so. Sure, you can have the browser sized to a reasonable size, but it's an added hassle. With a fixed-width website, however, the line length is much shorter. Your eyes won't get as tired from traversing the whole width of a page in a liquid layout.

It's also the same reason why newspapers run multiple narrow columns, rather than having it go across the whole page.

As a side note, Simon Willison has a nice Narrow Bookmarklet that lets you convert a website's liquid design to a fixed 500 pixel width page with one click.

Not even /. is HTML valid

[bazik]

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://slashdot. org

Not that I care about as it displays fine :)