Time to re-evaluate the standard norm of screen layout?

Take a look at 10 webpage designs, chances are that about eight or nine have the following design;

A “header” at the top with a top level navigation and a search field to your right.
A submenu residing to your right.
A footer with contact or a sitetree.

Between the header and the footer the content float from top to bottom of the page. Ok so there could be some minor takes on what I just said, but on the whole, that’s how the web looks.

The reasons I think we should re-evaluate that base are a few:
1. A majority of the new computers being produced have a 16:9 or 16:10 screen, leaving a very small top to bottom area when it comes to pixels. All the major browsers keep menues, tabs, locationbar etc at the top or bottom of the screen, leaving you with even less space.

2. We’re starting to navigate our systems differently, let’s face it: clicking links and dragging scrollbars around isn’t as fun as it use to be. Now it’s all about swiping, tapping and other cool new gestures.

3. Speaking of swiping, there’s a lot of handhelds out there. Think of the design I described above, not so cool on a 7×5″ display now is it? Here we are back to web 1.0 when we had to make 2 websites for 2 browsers.

What would be the first step towards a more flexibel web layout?

Gestures
I think we should start to designt the things we don’t need to see:
Swipe to the right or left instead of clicking next/prev in a pagination display.
Dubbletapping to reveal a menu.

Utilizing available space
On most screens there’s more pixels from left to right than from top to bottom, but the designs are still stuck in the 960 grid. Lets make content more liquid and fill up the page from left to right. There’s some nice new features in CSS3 called column-count for instance that will be much usefull for this.

Make a proper structure
A proper structure built upon tags, categories or whatever is your terminology, makes for a superb navigation. Why have both a menu, a site structure a taglist and a search field on every page?
Are your site that hard to navigate? Or maybe your visitors just that stupid? Let’s be honest, quite few users comes to your index page and starts looking for something, they probably got to that specific page on your site because a search engine or a link took them there. For this, a “related” section is much more likely to be useful for your visitor rather that a site tree or a taglist.

So in conclusion, what I am saying is: really think and rethink your design next time you do a layout, don’t just do as we always have done. It’s time for something new.