It's interesting to note that, while in this case it was classic arcade game collectors, were the right connections to be made there might be a dozen other enthusiast groups around who'd have given their right arms to come relieve the ship of its, say, chandeliers or its plumbing fixtures or its antique shipping charts or what have you.
It's always surprising how many niche pursuits there are, with people around the world pouring passion and time into them and going largely unnoticed.
I know commenting on the website and not the content is deeply frowned upon, but this case is so egregious that I feel compelled to break the rule.
The entire left side of my screen is a static image. I can't scroll to pass it. Literally half a screen just not doing anything during my entire reading experience. I'm the last person to complain about web-design (really I'm a total philistine on these issues). But its bad enough that it got in the way of digesting the article efficiently. That's where I draw the line.
It's just a responsive design to keep the body text from getting too wide. Most sites do this one way or another, because very wide columns of text are harder to read.
I mean, if you read the same article on medium.com then much of your screen still wouldn't be doing anything - on medium the unused space would be blank margins; here it's a hero image.
Preventing the text getting too wide is one thing, but this seems excessive. The image to the side is distracting, and the actual text of the article is only taking about 35% of the screen width.
> the article is only taking about 35% of the screen width
The point is absolute size, not relative. I'm no expert but I seem to recall usability types talking about ideal columns of text being 60-90 characters or so. If your browser is three times wider than that, it's reasonable for sites to show text that takes only a third of the screen. Why wouldn't they?
It is weird. On the other hand, most news sites these days only use half the screen width for the article, with the rest going to internal links and ads; at least this one uses the wasted space for something relevant to the article.
I hadn't even noticed that until i went back to look after reading your comment. I actually don't mind it for some reason.
Now there are other things that annoy me a lot like those upper or lower borders that follow you as you scroll but not this, strangely.
Wow, you can see this ship from the train while travelling between the North Wales coast and London. I must have passed it hundreds of times while travelling this way since I was a young boy, and was always intrigued. I would have been even more interested if I'd known the contents!
It's just a standard Wordpress theme. Images are resized dependent on the device you are viewing on. Viewed on mobile or tablet, the hero image is at the top and scrolls through as you read.
It's always surprising how many niche pursuits there are, with people around the world pouring passion and time into them and going largely unnoticed.