Facebook Fan Page Width Change – Your App Needs a Pixel Diet

August 13, 2010 By Adam,

August 23 is the date. Mark it on your calendar. Facebook will be stealing 240 of your precious pixels. Custom app tabs will go from 760 pixels to 520 pixels. Not to mention that boxes on the left hand side will be removed as well. If you are a page admin, you can see how the pages will look when they make the change now. If your content is wider than the new 520, you will have some major layout issues and potentially images being cut off (on the right side). The work required to accommodate this change is more design heavy than tech heavy. HTML and CSS are relatively easy to adjust compared to having the design team rethink the layout and design elements. Unknown to most, this change was originally announced back in October 2009, but has had little mention or indication as to when it would be pushed - until recently. It makes sense that Facebook wants to reclaim the left column and make everything uniform, but 520 pixels? HTML emails are designed wider than that. Is this a step forward or backward? How will the change in fan page width affect your brand? There are quite a few big brands that have some work to do over the next 2 weeks to get ready for the change. Here are few that caught my attention. This is what they will look like after a 240 pixel reduction. X Games