About this redesign

This is an unsolicited redesign of Dendy Cinemas Canberra's website, built for a COMP4020 studio crit — not affiliated with or endorsed by Dendy.

I'm a regular there — it's the only IMAX screen in Canberra, tickets are noticeably cheaper than the other cinemas around town, and it's a short trip from campus, so it's become my default place to catch a film.

What's wrong with the original

The real now-showing page is actually a reasonably functional grid — a day picker up top, then each film as its own card listing today's session times. What it doesn't do: order films by how much is actually on. Spider-Man: Brand New Day and The Odyssey run 21 and 13 sessions today respectively, but you'd have to count time buttons across the whole page to notice — they're just listed in whatever order Dendy put them in, all posters the same size. Ticket price and the specific cinema hall also don't appear anywhere on the page; both only show up once you're picking a seat at checkout. What actually got to me: picking a session only works through a dropdown, and it's a mess — a handful of niche titles sit above the big, heavily-scheduled releases, so a film running dozens of sessions a day can get buried in the middle of the list, and the poster thumbnails inside the dropdown are so small you can barely tell one film from another. Worse, if I picked a session and it turned out to be the wrong one, going back wiped the whole selection and I had to redo every step from scratch. That's the exact moment I decided to borrow from other sites' designs instead of just accepting Dendy's picker as a given.

What this redesign changes

The homepage sorts films by session count, most-shown first, adds a date picker for today plus the next five days, and lets you tap a poster to enlarge it and see that film's full schedule below — time and ticket price for every session, each time marked up as a machine-readable <time>. Every date's line-up is pulled from Dendy's own multi-day showtime pages, and every "Book at Dendy" link goes straight to that specific session's real checkout page rather than a generic movie page. Price is the one thing still invented — it isn't published anywhere on Dendy's real site, only appearing once you're picking a seat at checkout — and that's disclosed once, in the site footer, rather than repeated next to every number. Cinema hall isn't shown at all: there's no way to know it without actually booking, so rather than invent one we just leave it out. The same component powers the showtimes page. Booking still hands off to Dendy's real site, and the account page is a static mockup with fake order data — this prototype is static, with no backend, login, or booking system of its own.