Scrolling pages — Life below The Fold

Is there life below “The Fold?”

“Have you ever been on a webpage and thought: I’d love to read the rest of this, but I’m just not pre­pared to scroll down”?

Thought not.

This post is inspired by Paddy Donnelly’s excel­lent “Life Below 600px” art­icle which nails superbly an issue within Web Design that we’ve been banging our heads against for years.

Since ‘Web time’ began, (which for us was when Pho­toshop 3 and Dream­weaver 1.2 came out in about 1998) you wouldn’t believe how many cli­ent meet­ings we have atten­ded or pro­ject tenders we have read where it has been insisted that “WEBSITE MUST NOT SCROLL”. Brrrrr, it’s like nails down a chalkboard.

We’ve often heard over the years how: “no con­tent must be out of view when within an 800x600 browser win­dow”. It’s unbe­liev­able isn’t it?

Pos­sibly to blame for the ‘no scroll’ stip­u­la­tion was a lot of cre­dence given to “user exper­i­ence experts” dur­ing the early to mid 2000’s, who all claimed that vis­it­ors wouldn’t ever be bothered to scroll down a web page to learn more or read any fur­ther inform­a­tion. Hit them with the “Prize” con­tent straight away was the philosophy.

Learn to love those scrollbars

Of course, it’s good advise to have cer­tain con­tent pri­or­it­ised and have “call-to-actions” or “user goals” very vis­ible on your webpage. It’s also a good tac­tic some­times to have the “Prize” lower down a page, as there is a selling job to do before any­one would take the “Prize”, a con­fid­ence to be gained by the vis­itor and after a care­ful build up and per­sua­sion …then offer the “Prize”. Your con­ver­sion rate of “Prize” takers can be often bet­ter this way.

How­ever, to insist that a page shouldn’t go bey­ond a cer­tain ‘drop’ (The Fold) has def­in­itely been some­times a request you just can’t dis­suade a cli­ent against.

As a res­ult, it’s been true that some­times very real neg­at­ive knock on’s come in to play:

• Designs have been forced to be squashed within a very lim­ited space
• Levels of text required for adequate SEO pur­poses is not reached
• Fixed dimen­sion let­ter­box shaped lay­outs have used ‘frameset’ tech­niques to intro­duce scroll­bars into small text areas, rather than allow­ing a page to nat­ur­ally scroll — cre­at­ing access­ib­il­ity problems.

Thank­fully, “The times they are a chan­gin’, and the above the fold web­site is becom­ing a thing of the past we are very pleased to report.

So if you see our eyes close and fore­heads fall onto the meet­ing table with a bang, you know the Fold is to blame, and you’ve prob­ably just dropped the F-Bomb!