That didn’t last long.
Barely 24 hours ago we went live with the "Swapped Column" format change for "Adam Smith, Esq.," switching the wide/right column for the narrow/left column. (As previously reported, the middle/content column was untouched.) Although we did it for a reason—trust me, one of my standing resolutionns in life in general is that I always try to do things for a reason—I didn’t like it and some readers were gracious enough to write and mention that they didn’t like it either.
The problem as I diagnosed it was that having the wide column on the left, before one’s eye came to the content column, was far more distracting than having it on the right (since we read English left to right).
I also took a quick sanity-check tour of the Web and confirmed that such professionally-done sites as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, The Economist, et al., follow what seems to be an emerging or emerged Web convention of “wide-right.”
So there you have it.
But another one of my standing resolutions in life is that you’ll never know unless you try it, and that what you learn from a "failed" experiment can be at least as valuable as what you learn from successes. After all, without failed experiments we never would have had penicillin or Lucite, and we’d still be relying on the "ether" as the universal medium that transmits light.
