I found a really interesting link on Twitter yesterday that says the the myth of “above the fold” in web design is officially dead. If you’re not familiar with this term, it originally came from the newspaper world where newspapers are generally folded in half. The 50% of the content that fell on the upper half of that fold was said to be “above the fold”. If you look at any newspaper today, you’ll see that the main stories, major headlines, and basically anything that’s supposed to be really important are printed on the upper half of the fold.
This tradition eventually migrated over to the online world where all of the important content on the homepage (or any page for that matter) was designed to be “above the fold”. In the online world, “above the fold” meant the part of the web page that you can see without having to scroll down.
This sometimes made for some very messy layouts where designers sometimes tried to cram everything at the top of a website so that people wouldn’t have to scroll down. The logic was that people hated to scroll, so if you had something on your website that you really wanted people to look at, make sure that it was located at the top. Back when this principle was during it’s heyday, I had websites that were a nightmare to design because the client didn’t want people to scroll down at all!
According to this mini-report that’s no longer true today because:
- Monitor sizes have gotten bigger (an Apple Cinema display anyone?)
- Screen resolutions are getting smaller
- Because of the different sized monitors and screen resolutions, there’s no certainty of where “the fold” actually is
- People really don’t mind scrolling down after all…especially if you have a nifty scroll-wheel mouse
So what does this mean for you and your art website? Basically this:
- It’s still a good idea to design your website so that your most important content is up at the top…but you don’t have to cram everything else up there too.
- If your “above the fold” content indicates that there’s more good information if you just scroll down…people will do it.
- Sprinkle your “calls to actions” or other important stuff on different positions throughout the page. My newsletter sign ups are located in three different pages on any part of my blog. At the top of a blog post, at the upper right hand corner…and on the footer of the blog. The top spot still gets 85% of the sign ups…but people still sign up from the footer too!
You can download the report here. It’s a really quick and interesting read.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Interesting update on and old way of thinking. I love to keep up to date on current design techniques. Thanks for the free report!
I’m not convinced that “above the fold” is completely dead yet. While it’s true that people are more educated about viewing websites than in the past, it’s also true the people are “scanners” when they read a web page. Sometimes you only have a few seconds to get their attention in some way.
Your goal should be to have whatever it takes above the fold to convince them to actually scroll down to the rest of your site!
So in that respect, I think the above the fold concept is going to continue to persist for quite some time. =)
I agree that the “above the fold” isn’t *dead* per se. I think that crazy insistence that many had that everything except the privacy policy and the copyright notice has to be above the fold is dead. You have to decide what’s the most important goal of the page and make what goes on above the fold work towards achieving that goal…it must also encourage people to read below the fold as well.