engadget is a fluffy tech website. It doesn’t provide pages of benchmarks and charts like AnandTech or in-depth analysis like Ars Technica. It provides stories about consumer electronics in simple, easily-digested stories. And that’s okay. I don’t always want comprehensive.
The site has apparently gone through a quiet redesign in the last few days or an intern has gotten his unauthorized hands on the code. The main change is the left column that lists stories in chronological order has been widened. Eyeballing it, it now seems to occupy a little over two-thirds of the page. As every story also includes an image below the headline, the images are correspondingly bigger, too. The image in the Vimeo story shown below is 960×535 pixels. My browser window (on a 24″ 1920×1200 pixel monitor) is currently sized to 1512×1000 pixels (this is somewhat randomly chosen but seems to work for my browsing needs). This means the image–a stock photo of an iPhone showing Vimeo’s Cameo app icon–is the single largest element in my browser window. The actual content of the story is reduced to three lines before I need to scroll to see the rest of it.
Having stock photos and other unneeded images dominate the page is bad design. I don’t know why they would do this, there doesn’t seem to be a logical reason for it.
Anyway, I don’t have the time or inclination to complain further. I’ll just stop here with another image of another story from the site. Enjoy very large stock image!
