Revisiting "The Fold" | Hacker News Reader

Revisiting "The Fold"

codinghorror.com

19 pointsbdfh429 comments

Focusing on 'above the fold' is as much about first impressions of your site as it is about where the content is located. It definitely is still an important consideration even with scrolling.

Though my initial impression of the article was that he was saying 'the fold is bunk', which I'd disagree with, I think he wrapped it up clearly with advice on how to pay the right attention to what is above the fold.

Design is an art, so there won't be rigid rules that apply to every situation. This should come as no surprise. Personally, I know how to scroll, but I like being able to read a lot of the content before scrolling.

On a side note, my pet peeve is a design that requires scrolling immediately but also auto-selects an input field so I can't page-down when the page loads.

If you have to design your website to encourage users to scroll below the fold, isn't that still accounting for it?

It's more accounting for users' expectations due to years of designers obsessed with the fold.

Its fun to watch a bunch of programmers struggle with design. They're learning/blogging about pretty obvious problems that most designers don't even remember solving and usually fix subconsciously.

I personally find these blog posts a little boring. This was the kind of stuff I used to deal with as a designer daily for a media site 5+ years ago. And frankly, none of it is as hard as they make it out to be. They need to hire a good designer and be done with it.

No offense, but I don't think the post was direct towards you.

It's like when Smashing Magazine puts out "here's how you write a 5-line JavaScript" function. The post is obviously directed towards designers with little programming knowledge/skill, and it would be boring to most programmers, but most of them realize that and don't litter the comments with "This is easy, I knew this when I was 12 years old. Just hire a developer."

It's called spreading the knowledge and targeting different content at different folks.

Next thing you know this place will be called Hacker News instead of Designer News. Kidding; both your and the parent's points are well taken.

Patrick tells us everything we need to know about "revisiting 'the fold'"- we don't, it's still there, and it's still important.

Go upvote him: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=840972

That's totally true, though it may depend on the sort of web site you have. The company I work for is in the comparison shopping space, which tends to have a high bounce rate and get a lot of traffic from google. Putting something above the fold has a huge effect if it makes a few percent more people stay and interact with the site.

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