Meryl's Notes Blog

The above the fold myth says not to worry about content above the fold (the screen before scrolling) and when the fold matters. I disagree.

Above the fold matters. Great example of the problem with not watching the above the fold just happened this week. My tennis team’s captain sent a link to a Web page that showed a tank shirt along with its description as the below image shows (click to view larger).

A lot of teammates didn’t notice the scroll bar because they were focused on the content. This looks like the end of the page (aside from the navigation). And that’s what most of the team thought.

They thought we only needed to order a shirt. When the captain talked about the other options — they were perplexed. Turned out they didn’t scroll. Here is what was below the fold. This happens often. Don’t take scrolling for granted — content can trick the eyes into thinking nothing appears below the fold.

Also more sites are getting in the bad habit of using large banners / headers on their home page. This pushes content below the fold. Again, scrolling is not a big deal — but people who surf from site to site (and many of us do that) wants to see the content right there as soon as they land.

Wish I could remember where I recently read about content should come before the design, not fit to the design. The above the fold problem is one reason. The other reason — recently I worked on content for a new Web site (not up yet) and the design put emphasis on the wrong content. But it was too late to make design changes to fit with the content.