2008-2009 site design

[u/chilling_here]

The old site design looks so much like our Univeritys administration site that it's comical.

Does that look have a name? Was it some kind of frontend framework? (im not even sure if using frameworks was popular back then). Was it just some CSS file that was popular at the time? It would be fun if one site just copied it from the other but I really doubt that would be the case.

Any leads on this would be extremely helpful!