Ars Technica has updated their look, their background software and hardware, ad placement and more as of this morning:
We also knew that we needed to slim our pages down quite a bit. Our old design was image heavy thanks to all the rounded corners and polish. With the new site, the preponderance of images we do serve will be associated with stories, and not the design. And thanks to increased CPU overhead again, we can gzip our content before serving it to you. All in all, Ars is lighter and faster than before. You can’t appreciate the full effects just yet, because we have tweaking to do now that the site is live, but hopefully you can already tell the difference.
Another factor adding into the increased speed is that we’ve actually eliminated 33 percent of our ad placements. At a time when other sites are cramming more and more ads on their pages, we went in the opposite direction. We now have two major display ad positions instead of three, and I hope you appreciate our efforts to keep things reasonable. None of you work for free, and we can’t either. But we don’t want to follow other sites and explode advertising everywhere just because of an economic downturn.