Life Below 600px
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This is not the general rule, but an exception to it.
Always test, and don't assume that the general rules apply to your type of business, product/service/content, customers.
People aren't arguing that ALL of you content needs to be above the fold. The argument is that the fold gets the most attention from your audience. When you're optimizing, you should optimize the things that will have the biggest impact first. Many times that is the content above the fold.
And let's not forget that a general web page is going to attract different audience. This article seems to be saying that since you went below the fold on their article, that you will go below the fold on everything. That's false. I went below the fold on this article because I went to the page specifically to read the article.
Unlike a newspaper that needs to attract you as you glance towards a rack containing it and other similar publications, a website already has your attention to an extent and as you've probably just followed a link (rather than the site having opened in a pop-up/under window) you chosen to be there and have at least a vague idea about what to expect - the first half-screen does not need to compete with other half-screens to grab the user's attention, it just needs to not put them off (in the case mentioned in powertower's post, by mentioning cost too early).
It's a nicely designed site, but I wouldn't say it puts essential material only below the fold.
You can use the content that has no need to scroll to capture the attention, but there is no need to stuff everything there. I think that 37 signals is an example about that as they don't try to put too many "information" above the fold, but only a few important stuff, and many other info is distributed across all the page.
Plus, Matt Cutts recently said at Pubcon that Google now analyzes the content which it decides is above the fold, and places a higher value on that content in terms of determining SEO results.
I completely agree that we shouldn't stuff the top of the page with every important pieces of content and navigation option to the point where it makes the page a mess. But at the same time you can't treat a really long page as if the content in the middle or bottom gets the same attention as the content at the top.
So Google decides where the fold is and not the designer or visitor? That seems stupid to me. How are they to determine such a thing? How are we as website creators supposed to know what Google's idea of the fold is to make sure we get that high value? Seems another way for people to game Google by stuffing all the content within this "fold" making for crappy websites.
Am I crazy that I think we shouldn't be designing websites for search engines but for people?
Previously, Google would place a higher priority on content that came towards the beginning of a page. As users became aware of this, they then began organizing their code so that the most SEOable content was at the beginning of the HTML file, but used CSS to make sure that the what users saw as the beginning of the page was still optimized for people.
Presumably, now Google is checking to see which parts are actually styled to appear at the beginning, regardless of order in the source files.
The reason I said it's a straw man is because I've never seen anyone actually champion that point of view. I've seen minimalist landing pages, but I haven't come across any I can think of that try to cram everything above the fold.
Thankfully, in this age, evidence-based testing has triumphed.
And anyway, isn't the person's monitor a physical fold? Like, you still want to attract their attention with content. Having good content in the first 1000 vertical pixels doesn't mean you can't have good content everywhere else.
Very nice article though.
It's not that people won't scroll. It's that they won't stick around without a reason. And if they stick around, they will scroll - so use the top of the page to get them to stick.
The state of the industry in a nutshell.
And although not as artful, the "sameness" is unfortunately an area where usability kicks design in the ass.
First of all, the author has an incorrect interpretation of the guidelines. It's not 'Never, ever, ever use tables', it's 'Never use tables for layout'. And it's not stick ZOMG-EVERYTHING above the fold, it's make sure your most important stuff is above fold.
The main piece of "evidence", the 37-signals site, is bunk. Their site doesn't "give the fold the finger". I embraces it. What does 37-signals sell? They sell their SaaS products. When you visit their site, what do you see above the fold? Their major Saas products. Oh, you can click on them and get more information. This is precisely following the above-the-fold guideline.
The other piece of "evidence" the author submits - that "even if it goes even further down the page, way below the fold. You're still reading." is also bunk. I read the article because I clicked through from HN. I was already invested in reading the article. People that intend to read your content WILL read your content.
You can put content anywhere, and your mother will read it. But that's because she's your mother. You don't design a site for your mother, you design your site for potential customers/consumers. The above-the-fold guideline is to make a design appropriate for people unfamiliar with what's to come, to give them direction.
My takeaway from this was to really just remember that the rules have their place but it's a mistake to follow them just because they've become accepted. The web has changed so much in the past 3 years alone that we need to reevaluate the rules and each time we design a site ask ourselves if we're doing this because it's the rule or because it makes sense in terms of design and usability.
I'm still seeing a ton of people preach about using the keyword meta tag and preaching about divitis and semantic markup. Those ideas are all well and good but things are different now. I know those aren't exactly design related issues but the point is that some people are being fed outdated info.
There are a lot more opportunities to break the rules And actually be rewarded these days. So you're content is more like a section than an article. Okay, well that's debatable. Too many divs? Well it could be or maybe there's no other way and it's not hurting future modifications or rendering or load times. So be it.
The point is that we can't be blindly following these rules. Obviously we really need to know and understand the rules first. But once you know the rules you can then break them when it makes sense. I read the post such that the author was basically saying "think about if the rule you're about to implement makes sense. If you found another way that works do it. We're all pros and we can handle it". Amateurs should stick to the rules until they get their bearings but the rest of us should remember that it's not 1997 anymore and sometimes those rules don't apply to the situation.
I'm not disagreeing with you, just had a different take on the message in the post.
Regardless of what a user does afterwords (such as scrolling or clicking) we can all agree that the first experience is "Above the fold". Just another way of thinking about it. I agree that if you have good content users can and will easily scroll to see the rest.
"Web users spend 80% of their time looking at information above the page fold. Although users do scroll, they allocate only 20% of their attention below the fold."
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/scrolling-attention.html
The article includes the results of an eyetracking study, and a few examples of viewing patterns where people did spend a lot of time below the fold.
But please also bear in mind those of us who use trackballs :)
If he tried to pack all of his "content at the top", readability and usability would suffer.