User blog comment:Susanolivia/Fixed Width, Sidebar, and the Removal of Monaco/@comment-8072-20101001043024/@comment-4713673-20101001201245

LordTBT, thanks for the thoughts. The last points are matter (or perhaps difference) of opinion, so I'm not able to answer those objectively but I will answer the first two points below:

Earlier this year when when we released improvements to the Monaco skin we were still paying only to support one production skin - Monaco. (I'm excepting Monobook in this response as our main points are Monaco and the new look.) The point made in this post is that supporting two production skins is not feasible and frankly would give a degraded user experience on both skins as we would have to divide our resources. The improvements made to Monaco are actually applicable to the new look as well, site speed improvements involve operations re-thinking how items on the site are served and improving efficiency in those areas. As we move into the new look we are most certainly taking those learnings with us, so the time was still well spent. Themes are also coming along with us as the basic concept behind many of the themes hasn't changed.

I speak to the question of white space in my answer to M1shawhan below - in the interest of not making this too long I'll refer you there for that question.

We agree that having the ad in the content area was not the best compromise and now we are removing the issue with that ad by placing it in the sidebar, instead of the content area. I'm not going to go into a lot of details about the reasoning behind the way ads are sold and the needs of advertisers surrounding the popular 300x250 ad because I think that gets us a bit off topic. Two years is an eternity in terms of the pace of growth on the internet and the learnings from how users interact with ads. Reasoning from two years ago is stale compared to the most current thinking on the subject and that is why this reasoning is slightly different than what you may have seen at that time.