That's interesting, I have a totally different experience with the site. The animated ad for the Sunday magazine totally dominates my glance at the page. My eye is drawn along the horizontal and vertical rules to ads in blue, yellow, red. I don't immediately see "Top Stories" or "Sections"; I see the flash ad, then "IN SUNDAY'S TIMES", then a tab-headered table labeled "MEN'S 3RD ROUND|WOMEN'S 4TH ROUND".

The site, to me, is a good example of the tension between old-school print standards and web-based media. If you take a given story I prefer to read the "PRINT"-ed version, e.g., http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/07/world/07weapons.html?hp vs. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/07/world/07weapons.html?pagew... The former is busy, moves, has lots of conflicting colors. The "printed" version is widely-spaced, simple.

The sfgate.com website strikes a different balance that's seems further from its respective printed paper. It's similarly strewn with ads and blinkies, but they don't seem as jarring to me, it feels like a website while the nytimes feels like "the website of the newpaper".