Keep that website 'above the fold'
One of the commonly bandied about terms we hear from people when building websites is that they want all of their site to appear 'above the fold', something we try and accommodate where possible. This term, often thrown about in marketing circles, refers to what you see initially when opening a website, without using the scroll bars.
One thing that tends to be forgotten though is 'where is this fold'? A few years back, this wasn't too hard to achieve. Everyone tended to use the same screen resolution (800x600 generally), and everyone was using Internet Explorer, so you had a fairly good gauge of what sort of screenspace you had to work with. Nowadays screen resolution has gone up and up... and then simultaneously waaaay back down again with the advent of tiny screened notebooks, resulting in a screen height difference of nearly 50%, and that's before you even consider the differences in the height of all the junk at the top of a typical user's web browser (favourites, spellchecker, Google Toolbar, Yahoo Toolbar, Toaster, Sandwich Maker....). As an example, take MSN UK, opened on a 'netbook' style screen, compared to the super-hires monitor on one of the design desks:-
This may only leave a truly safe height of a paragraph right at the very top of the screen, and once you've put your branding, some banners and site navigation in there, most of that is gone too. If you're desperate for everything to be definitively above the fold, that's a very small area you're choosing to limit everything to, and cramped designs are as likely to be unread. So what's the solution? Remember that users aren't stupid, and don't panic if not everything can be seen at once on your machine, as optimising too greatly for what you see might only be the same as what 5% of the rest of the public see. Research has thankfully shown that people do use the vertical scrollbar (though oddly are less keen on the horizontal one), so as long as you have your main branding, and possibly squeeze in the very top title for the page's content into the area at the top, most people will continue to read the rest of your page. And if they don't, then they're almost certainly the same visitor who wouldn't have read it if it were 'above the fold' too!
Posted By: Terence
26 November 2009