Until recently it seemed that everybody—designers and clients alike—were obsessed with the idea that everything on a web page had to be ‘above the fold’ That is, it had to fit into the first screen’s-worth of the page without the need to scroll. The ‘fold’, of course, is a concept originating from the newspaper industry; the paper being folded in order to fit on a shelf or into a street vending cabinet, and so you had to get your eye-grabbing headlines into that top section. The idea propagated through into the direct mail industry and acquired a seemingly unstoppable momentum.
However, it doesn‘t translate as simplistically into a digital model. First of all, if you design with ‘the fold’ as a prime consideration then you have to ask yourself “where is the fold?” A few years back all computers had screen sizes somewhere around the 800x600 pixel mark, but nowadays the range of screen sizes has never been greater. I personally have an iphone with a screen sized at 320x480 px, and a desktop monitor sized at 2560x1600 px.
Web designers these days are actively trying to wean clients away from the idea of this illusory ‘fold’, and to get them to realise that, for the average informational web page, vertical scrolling is not a problem. People have been using the web for a while now, remember, and people are quite used to the idea that you might need to scroll to see the entire page. Tests show that if the content is interesting to them, scrolling will not deter anyone from reading the whole article or whatever. If the content is NOT interesting, well… in that case scrolling is not the issue.
Times when you SHOULD fold
It is not a black and white argument, of course. There are plenty of situations where you do want your content visible without scrolling. Landing pages for an online marketing campaign are a good example, where you probably have a concise description of your offer and some sort of ‘call to action’ button. Obviously you want both of those to be visible without scrolling.
In conclusion
For those specific situations where design elements are required to have ‘instant eye-grab’ then, yes, consider the typical monitor size of your audience (refer to your server logs for that invaluable information) or *intended* audience (harder to determine). Then design accordingly and cautiously in the knowledge that you may need to accommodate a wide range of screen sizes, and that monitor resolution does not necessarily give you the amount of space in your visitor’s browser window (see: The Myth of the Perfect Width for Web Design).
For other regular web pages that simply give information to the visitor, forget about the fold because most of the time it just doesn’t matter. To paraphrase/mutilate the famous line from Field of Dreams:
“If you make it interesting, they will scroll.”
Metropolitan Police
UNIC UK
Nova-I.T.
7 Comments… so far
I think the concept of fitting the content in the screen without scrolling it down is not feasible. Especially when more and more content is added to the site.
i agree with joel gray.. it is not really good to fit one page on a website without scrolling.. it is short and doesn’t really require attention.. specially if you want to put a lot of informations on it..
Yes, the compulsion to fit everything into the first screens’-worth comes, in my experience, largely from the client end. Studies (carried out by usability guru Jakob Nielsen and his team) have shown that people will scroll, provided they are interested in the content.
HOWEVER… since I posted this blog entry Nielsen updated his view on scrolling. (He did so a whole 11 days after this entry, on March 22, 2010; thanks a *bunch*, Jakob). His later studies show that although people will scroll, they also give a higher proportion of their attention (80%, in fact) to the content *above* the fold.
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/scrolling-attention.html
So the issue isn’t black and white, and I’ll probably need to update this post or write a follow up at some point. That’s the nature of the web though; we’re constantly refining our understand of what it is and how people interact with it, and those things are constantly changing anyway.
a web page had to be ‘above the fold’ “where is the fold?”
@Trampoline: Sorry if I wasn’t clear on that. The ‘fold’, in web terms, is the first screenful of information (ie. what the viewer sees at initial page load without having to scroll).
actually, it is good that the first part of the first picture or content that the people will see is interesting.. and for that, you will have a bigger chance that they will watch all of the website contents.
the number of views for the website and the number of hours that the people will stay is dependent on the content and most especially the first picture that would catch their attention..