So, Netflix has done a complete revamping of their site design - bringing some of the changes they made to the "New Releases" page to the rest of the site.
Having dabbled primarily in web application development now for awhile, the first thing that I noticed was that they changed the width of the overall layout. Previously, the site had a fixed layout fit perfectly well into any 800px wide display - catering to people still stuck using 800x600 as their screen resolution. This is something you used to see pushed a lot on the net. Making sure their your pages still look ok on older computers - or for yesteryears abundance of novices who hadn't even seen their Display control panel since they had installed Windows 98 years prior.
The new Netflix site design is still a fixed layout, but now looks best on a 1024px wide or wider display. Anything less, and you will get horizontal scroll bars. "So What? They have an extra 224 pixels of width to take up now -- big deal!" Well, I can tell you from experience, having worked on two large projects recently where one was designed to support 800x600 displays and the other only 1024x768 and above, that it is much easier to obtain a 'Web 2.0-ish' look when you have those extra pixels to play with. I am glad to see that high visibility sites like this are committing to a new, higher standard.
No comments:
Post a Comment