PS: Just saw a "What you see here is NOT how the site will look December 11!" on their site. Hope they don't clutter it up, I like the current simplicity.

When you say beautifully designed, do you actually mean ridiculously basic. Not that there's anything wrong with that. My expectation, based on your comments, definitely didn't line up with how the site looks.

"Beautifully designed" these days always seems to include a fixed-pixel-width layout, which I dislike due to its lack of adaptability to differing user situations.

but is it going to require us to pay to register? and is it going to do Google cloaking. That's what I want to know.

> When you say beautifully designed, do
> you actually mean ridiculously basic.

I think it's a huge improvement over SEW (SEW with its too-long reading lines, cluttered sidebars, animated ads and so on). With design I don't mean layout and graphics, by the way, but the "architecture" of a web site (layout being a part of that, of course) and how well it reaches its goals... in this case, readers being able to read and enjoy the posts. Here I was admiring the refreshingly minimalist approach (though I guess it won't stay minimalist, if I understand the comment above right). Sometimes we make assumptions like "a blog needs a navigation side bar" but I'm a daily reader of Search Engine Watch blog ever since their first post, and never* clicked on any of their sidebars or top bars.

*Well, you know. Practically never. Can't remember the last time I did. Probably I clicked on their RSS link a couple of times.

The new & official Search Engine Land went live today... very cool design I think, and still not cluttered!
http://searchengineland.com