There Is No Fold!

Designing for the web comes with a unique set of challenges and thus has its own ‘charm’. User interactivity, browser compatibility, connection speed, color calibration, flash, html, css… these are all factors that have to be accounted for when building a web page. (Each of these may become their own topic of discussion in time.) The sheer number of variables to control can make the process extremely tedious.

The technology underlying these variables is extremely new and is constantly changing. It’s a little bit of a ‘wild west’ environment. So, understandably, many of the people who commission web work are still a bit new to the whole thing and, therefore, it falls on designers and developers to educate and guide them through the process. Overall, it’s a rewarding experience. But you do sometimes have to overcome certain preconceptions that people carry over from their days in traditional media.

The Myth of ‘The Fold’

‘The Fold’ comes from the layout of newspapers. Because a newspaper is folded in half in a newsstand, any important photos or headlines needed to be ‘above the fold’ in order to have an affect on buyers. This practice became de riguer and the term carried over in the early days of the web to refer to the area of the browser window that is viewable without scrolling.

The thing is, a web browser is not a newspaper. A user can scroll infinitely, meaning that a page is not limited to a specific size the way newspapers are. This simple fact opens up web design to new possibilities in the same fundamental way that links and interactivity have. But conventional wisdom dies hard, and so there is often pressure to limit content on a page to only what will fit ‘above the fold’. This greatly reduces the possibilities of what a given page can be and ignores some of the basic advantages offered by the web.

It’s true that the most important parts of a web page (Headlines, Navigation, Logos) should appear near the top of the window in order to maintain consistency and visibility. But the notion that content should be limited by an imaginary line is positively archaic. This is because THERE IS NO FOLD. The myth debunked in a few bullet points:

• Web pages are not static. Content can be as limited or as extensive as is prudent. Books, for example, have multiple pages because the page size is fixed. The content cannot all fit on one sheet. On the web, there are no such limitations. You can fill a page to your heart’s content.
• Users do scroll.The notion that content will be ignored if the user must scroll to find it has been statistically proven false. Users accept scrolling as a part of the web experience and do so as a matter of habit. This argument is similar to asserting that no one will read ‘Don Quixote’ because it is more than one page.Studies show that 91% of web pages are long enough to require a scroll bar. Of those pages, users actually scroll at least some of the page 76% of the time. And users scroll the entire page 22% of the time. (When you factor our repeat visitors and those who found what they wanted near the top of a page, this figure is significant.) Additionally, the length of the page has no statistical bearing on the percentage of users who scroll the entire page, suggesting that page length is not the determining factor in this behavior.
• There is no such thing as a standard page size. Page size is determined by a combination of the user’s monitor resolution, browser window size, and browser toolbar size. There are as many different potential page sizes as there are users. So it is impossible to design a page that looks great for every user without scrolling.