Home | About Chris Hope | Contact Chris Hope | Search:

IMDB website design changed

Posted September 4th, 2008 in Miscellaneous Postings

I was looking something up on the Internet Movie Database last night and noticed that the design seemed to have been modified slightly. It is now a fixed width and centered in the browser window instead of the previous "stretchy" middle column.

I look at the IMDB just about every day and was surprised to see the layout appeared to have changed slightly. Just to confirm that it really had been changed I looked first at the Wayback Machine, but the most recent entry was from March 2008 and in any case it was broken last night and wouldn't let me look at the pages.

So instead I managed to bring up a Google cache page of the IMDB homepage which was dated from August 26th 2008 and is shown in the screenshot below. I'm fairly certain that I had looked at the IMDB the previous night as well, so I am assuming they made the new layout go live as of the 1st of September 2008.

The old design above shows the three column layout filling the entire width of the screen with fixed width left and right columns and a stretchy middle column which takes up the rest of the available area.

The new layout, as shown in the screenshot below, has the same three column structure and the content/navigation/etc itself is still the same, but now the middle column is a fixed width and the whole page is centered in the middle with a grey page background.

I personally like the new layout as I generally prefer fixed width designs over stretchy/liquid ones but you'll find all sorts of rants out there which prefer stretchy/liquid layouts over fixed ones.