A few years back I had a meeting with our TV manager and our Radio manager and we talked about the web. Specifically, I wanted to develop some kind of taxonomy of topics into which all our content — locally-originated or national — could fit. We could post extras, our local stuff, links to national stuff, all in different topical areas that would be of interest to our audience both broadly and in specific niches.
Of course, we never had the resources to actually develop the taxonomy into something useful online, but the dream was there…
Well, KQED has gone and done it. They blended it into their site redesign, and it looks fabulous. Todd Mundt scooped me earlier this week but I couldn’t let the week pass without throwing in my own congratulations. And, yes… I’m jealous.
But to make myself feel better, I’ll pick one nit: The columns of content in the footer do not line up with the columns of content in the body of the page, indicating that the site is not built on a traditional graphic designer’s grid. So there. 😉
Seriously, though, it’s hard to blend a multiplatform service into a unified web site. I’ve actually done it both ways and it’s harder to do it this way. Lots of competing interests get involved, making a designer’s life tougher. So big congratulations to the KQED web team.
I hope to steal all their ideas before the end of the year.
Gravity Medium 
Thanks for the kind words! I’m Eric Westby, Senior Producer and lead designer for KQED.org.
John Proffitt wrote: “The columns of content in the footer do not line up with the columns of content in the body of the page, indicating that the site is not built on a traditional graphic designer’s grid.”
The footer is universal, intended to live entirely outside the grid of the remainder of the site; it was built to work on both two- and three-column pages, of which the site has both. It’s rendered in reverse type precisely to denote its “otherness,” while the color scheme, typeface, link style, etc., are the same so it still fits in visually. But you’re right, the intent was to break the grid so we could fill the space with links. In my experience page footers often stand alone: e.g., see the footers on sites such as MSNBC (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/), Yahoo! Food (http://food.yahoo.com/), etc.