What I’m missing is fluidity in the layout.

Not being nit-picky, but just a few quick accessibility type things that come to mind immediately:

Increasing text size:
1) The “No. 201″ circle does not increase in size with the text, so the text starts to get cut off

2) The top menu links disappear one by one off the right.

3) There are some images with Text inside. Where possible, can text be used for some of those instead where branding isn’t impacted? Examples:
a) the image in the bottom left of the home page that reads “From pixel to prose, coding to content.”
b) some of those images in the third column, perhaps?

While the target audience is probably not one that often needs to resize text very much, it would be interesting to see if ALA can somehow incorporate these considerations so as to teach readers pleasant design and accessibility through example.

Using Forms:
The search form does not use labels for the text field or check box

(All this was tested in Firefox 1.0.6 on XP. In bit of a rush to test with other browsers, or screen readers just now. More later, hopefully)

Good job though on the whole!

I am not a friend of column layouts on the Web. Especially here, where again two columns, the leftmost and rightmost, consist mainly of whitespace. Oh course, whitespace is important. But a flexible, fluid layout (with shrinking whitespace) and no horizontal scrolling is more important.

From what I have read in your comments I am quite happy to have set a large minimum font size in my browser. A quick check with disabling it made me still more happy. I cannot understand those eagle eyed designers using such tiny font sizes on the Web. Of course, people can zoom in, enlarge it, set a minimum font size; but most users do not know how – for them it would be better to respect their readable font size chosen in their browser.

Besides all this critique, the new ALA looks quite good in general, escpecially the colours.

Excellent piece of work, as expected of course! :D
I just was a little disappointed to encounter ant track text sizing. I know IE gets the standard text sizing wrong, but it’s a little effort to use an approach that works well in both IE and more compliant browers.
Other then that: I love ALA’s new look!

I liked seeing the id “lucre” for the ad (what an excellent choice) and chuckled at “ish” for the issue … not to mention “ishinfo,” “ishintro,” and “ishoutro.” I can almost hear Mooch exclaiming an approving “yesh!”