Apologies - we're working in this area, and some layout might be a little ugly.
The readability change affects primarily the Forums and Buy & Sell to a "Fixed Width" design. Over 95% of desktop computers have displays that are 1250 pixels or more, wide. On 27" monitors, stretching text across the whole window causes the "Watching the tennis" effect, where you eyes have to travel "vast" distances left/right to read the text. You could easily tweak this by resizing the browser window to your preferred with, but that's a pain, and with the move of many desktop browsers becoming 'full screen' (e.g. Windows 8), we needed to make a change.
This fixed width mode will suit most people, and is highly popular around the web, and well proven on sites with 400+ million users, such as Facebook and Twitter. We've provides some action photography to fill in the blank areas (for those on wide screens), which look great, and will soon be asking for submissions so that locals can feature their photos in this area.
If, for some reason, you prefer the older wide screen format, the option exists (find it a fixed/wide link at the bottom of most pages) where you can return to the original 'stretched view' layout. Some say you can't please all the people all the time, but we've given it our best shot to accomodate all.
There are also a bunch of updates/fixes to the forums and classifieds, and a new taller menu so you don't need to be so pixel accurate with the mouse to choose things.
In summary, I hope you really enjoy the new layout - we've been using it for a quite some time, and really enjoy it..
Change is good .. check the original look from 1997 when all we had was WA weather and an about page!
