The Guardian today debuted its long overdue redesign, albeit restricted mainly to the homepage prior to a network wide rollout. I wonder if they chose today specifically for the launch, with the widespread prediction of Tony Blair's resignation announcement certain to cause a peak in traffic. Good timing, whether it was intentional or not.

Importantly, the redesign meets multiple goals: satisfying users, by updating and maintaining technology trends; keeping advertisers happy with more and varied ad formats; and for once the homepage at least is completely standards-based and accessible, making use of CSS and separation of content and data layers to produce a page that is viewable across multiple platforms and media. Well done the Guardian, at long last.

The new look continues what the Travel channel started. The wide page layout takes full advantage of today's increased resolution and screen size. It also allows the introduction of larger and more varied ad formats, for example the two 300x250 MPU flash ads seen on the page now. Page width is major design decision when sprucing up a site after a number of years, as it affects every other design choice made subsequently, and undoubtedly follows much analysis of weblogs and user agent (browser) stats to ensure the site is meeting and keeping up with its audiences technology standards.

The site is structured with three equal columns, the first two holding most of the new and heavy content, the third a mix of featured items, text ads, sponsored items and a couple of navigations for the remaining bits and bobs not held elsewhere. This new structure had both strength and weaknesses. At first viewing there seems to be little differentiation between hard news and sport/travel/lifestyle sections. Indeed, when I viewed the site late last night and early this morning there was no hierarchy present in the news section at all. There was no distinction between the main story and the others - all news items were presented equally sized in a list format. Once the huge and expected news of Tony Blair's resignation plans broke this list was soon updated to a more familiar top story/secondary stories arrangement.

One benefit of this new structure is that sections other than news get much more of a "boost" than they had on the old site, filtering traffic through the paper's vast mine of content much more equitably.

Colour coded sections split the content up nicely, although it remains to be seen if this follows through to all the channels. Travel, for instance, is represented by a vibrant blue (#11B1FF) on the homepage, yet on the travel channel itself the channel highlight colour is a slightly more muted shade (#0099CC). A small niggle, but an inconsistency that the observant might pick up on, especially if the user is expected to identify the channel and the colour with one another, even at a subconscious level. The promotion in visibility of the various sections reflects the increasingly diverse nature of the Guardian's online offering

Barring the elegant Georgia serif headline font, the site makes no concessions to its paper version. It is its own thing. This seems to be editor Alan Rusbridger's vision, that it should stand alone, even though the paper business is currently supporting its expansion, and rumour has it that journos are upset at the attention the editor spends on it compared with the more traditional paper business.

Some nice touches include the "last updated" strapline under the logo, and the section at the bottom of the page that aggregates the various formats of news delivery Guardian readers can enjoy - G24 pdf, RSS, digital editions etc.

Early responses to Guardian Unlimited Editor-in-Chief Emily Bell's blog about the "next step" of the site seem to be largely negative. You might expect this to be a natural response to change, even among the Guardian's supposedly more progressive readership. I expect users will grow accustomed to the site on its more expansive platform over the next view weeks. Hopefully the rather jarring transition period for updating the rest of the site will be short.

Comparisons to the The Times Online or NYTimes.com, both of which had recent makeovers, are inevitable, although this is mainly down to similarities such as increased page width and white space, grid designs and coincidental timing, nothing more. Given the lengthy lead times in web development it would be harsh to criticise the Guardian's developers of plagiarism. The majority of these changes are technology-led, and as such are bound to resemble new and recently updated sites that are out there.

To sum up - a good, and long overdue, redesign. Clean, clear, fresh, vibrant and varied. And standards-based and accessible, something it is almost indecent not to be at this point in the evolution of the web. There's plenty of work to do in completing the site overhaul, and ensuring consistency of user experience and site behaviour, and I look forward to all of this, and any new surprises they want to pull on us.