Design Myth: Important information must be above the fold on a website.
“The Fold” is one of those terms leftover from the days before websites. In the newspaper business, headlining stories are always placed above the horizontal fold in the middle of the paper. When applied to web layouts, “above the fold” describes the content visible on the page before having to scroll down.
But actually, websites don’t have a fold.
Today, websites are being viewed on a multitude of different devices, each a slightly different size. This makes it so that the amount of visible information before having to scroll is different on every single device.
Think about it this way: when you load a website on your smartphone and look at it in the landscape orientation, you can only see a little bit of information, probably just a logo or header area. Switch to vertical orientation and now you can see the navigation. On your tablet, you can see the top call-to-action too. But some people use their tablets in a vertical orientation and they can also see some buttons further down the page. Laptop viewers can see some of your welcome message, while desktop viewers can see the entire welcome message. If you worry about getting all crucial information above the fold on every device, it’s going to get messy very quickly.
It’s better to just ignore the fold (to a degree … trust your designer on this one) and focus on a good overall layout instead.
And studies show that viewers don’t mind having to scroll. In fact, they expect to! In one article I found, their study suggested that when less content is above the fold, viewers tend to scroll and engage with the content more. Looks like less is more after all!
Myth: Busted!
Websites don’t have a fold. It’s probably more accurate to say they have many, many folds making designing for “above the fold” impossible. Instead of focusing on cramming everything above the fold, let the expert designers at Integrity Marketing focus on creating an engaging layout that will encourage viewers to follow your call-to-action – whether it be registering for an estate planning workshop, requesting a consultation, or something else.
Source: Leech, Joe “The myth of the page fold: evidence from user testing.” cxBlog, September 18, 2009.
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