if I remember correctly, Apple did a massive human factors study along with several studies on product placement on the web. they then came up with the followin

if I remember correctly, Apple did a massive human factors study along with several studies on product placement on the web. they then came up with the following: http://replay.waybackmachine.org/19980509035420/http://www.apple.com/ http://replay.waybackmachine.org/19980509035420/http://www.a... You will quickly notice a resemblance. It was proven unequivocally that the right hand large photo product placement with a bar of sub items below draws the most conversions. It has been replicated since then to where it has almost become an unspoken standard. If I recall correctly, Apple spent a massive amount on researching this and pretty much eliminated any other conceivable layout as drawing a higher conversion rate for product sales + recollection branding; that was the big key, not only did it drive higher sales, but it also served as identity branding as well. So you will see a lot of companies, that do their research, implementing this style page, if they are a product company. You will also see a lot of off the shelf templates that emulate it. There are countless Wordpress and Drupal themes that offer this layout. A lot of this info is from memory from the 90's, so take it with a grain of salt. The high level info is sound, but I may have got some of the details backwards.