Aug
2
One of the most important aspects of Website Usability is keeping content above the fold so users are not scrolling up and down your web pages. This is absolutely essential when it comes to the home page. People just don’t scroll on the home page.
By now you should know what I mean when I say “above the fold”, but if you are new here I will explain. When you visit a website, whatever is within the boundaries of your screen is Above The Fold. If you have to scroll down to read content or take action, you are venturing below the fold.
No Scrolling Is The Best Policy
Most users just don’t scroll when they come to a web page. This is more true on the home page than any other page. The majority of your sites’ visitors enter on your home page. The ones that don’t have more than likely hit an optimized page that you created for specific keywords. If they don’t see what they are looking for in 30 seconds they will either hit your home page or leave.
These statistics and others I am going to be using, come from years of experience and analytics from thousands of websites. Today I oversee the management of hundreds of websites, together the average close to a million unique visitors a day. I use advanced algorithms to create usability studies. I also have used teams of these companies employees in usability studies over the years. Read my Website Usability Overview and Website Usability Deep Link Navigation posts to learn more about how and where I get my data. I feel it is nesassary to qualify these statistics so everyone can see the importance of usability and analytics in their web strategy.
I want to be clear about this: I am not saying “don’t put content or site features below the fold” , I am saying “put your message and IMPORTANT site controls above the fold”! I generally will put content geared more to search engines than people below the fold. I am not talking about keyword stuffing, I merely am saying that a few paragraphs and static links within the bottom part of a page can go a long way to letting search engines know what your page is about. The critical info for users as well as search engines needs to be as close to the top as possible.
Users just don’t scroll, in fact 65% of home page visitors will not look at more than 1.3 screens worth of data under any circumstance on sub pages that actually have the information they are looking for! If your site is designed around either templates, includes, or css, keep the skin short, headers should not be more than 150 px high. This give you more screen real estate to work with. I prefer navigation elements to be on the left and across the header. These are very common design practices.
Last year when I was involved in a re-design of a 350 page web site that averaged 10,000 unique visitors a day, my team and a team of their employees looked at a list of 400 websites that were on or similar in topics to my clients. We found that 80% of the sites we looked at used the same design approach.
Out of those 400 websites, 90% of them had major site elements below the fold on the home page. Since my client had hired me to obtain traffic organically as opposed to the $16,000 they were spending a week on Google and Overture, I needed to come up with a design that would not only convert, but also be optimized for search engines.
We set up 4 different versions of the home page and split up the PPC so they got pretty close to equal traffic. By studying the different home page styles we were able to have their site visitors work for us and help us decide which was the best design! This is called landing page optimization. There are several companies that sell landing page optimization systems, and they are all very expensive. They also use scripting to control the different “recipes” or page designs. This is so similar to cloaking that I wouldn’t do it even if my clients had thousands of dollars to throw down the drain. We were able to do it all with our analytics suite for no extra costs at all.
The results were pretty much what I expected. The page that converted the most leads had all content and controls above the fold and used standard design and navigation.
One year later, this company is spending only $4000 a month on pay per click and is averaging more than 10,000 unique visitors.
The moral of this story is: KEEP YOUR CONTENT ABOVE THE FOLD!!!
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5 Responses to “Website Usability: Keeping Content Above The Fold”
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This seems intuitive but recent research suggests this old 1990s nugget is fading. See http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/blasting-the-myth-of
G Coker,
Thanks for the link, that is indeed a great article. I agree that design shouldn’t be restricted to above the fold and that designers shouldn’t cram everything above the fold. I think that IMPORTANT stuff should be above the fold.
Also interesting is the difference between an experienced user and an internet user with less experience. I have found usability studies that are broken down by user type to be more reliable. Experienced users are quicker to leave a site, but more inclined to scroll to find what they are looking for. A lot of these studies being thrown around are based on sites that have more long term visitors with more experience. I would like to see that experience breakdown included in the metrics.
The info I use is pretty basic. I look at the site overlay through Google Analytics. It shows where on a site people click on links. One of my biggest clients averages 11,000 unique visitors per day. I look at the overlays and not 1 link towards the bottom of the page was clicked! That was 1 weeks worth of traffic, not 1.
Now a blog is a different story. They tend to go long and especially when a user looks at a category, they are more inclined to scroll through article titles and descriptions to find what they are looking for. That is why I always use a description as the first couple of sentances of a blog post. All of my clients use summaries as opposed to 10 full articles on the home page, like my site is. THis is part of a test I am doing to see which way does better. So far the summaries is getting more play than the full articles.
I am no more of an expert than anyone else, I just relay the facts with the dat that I have. I still think it is best to have search functions, important content, and major site controls ABOVE THE FOLD. I also go by the 1024×768 screen resolution as the basis for my design. I welcome all comments on this important matter.
“The info I use is pretty basic. I look at the site overlay through Google Analytics. It shows where on a site people click on links. One of my biggest clients averages 11,000 unique visitors per day. I look at the overlays and not 1 link towards the bottom of the page was clicked! That was 1 weeks worth of traffic, not 1″
What kind of links were they? How were they displayed? What does toward the bottom of the page mean? How long was the page? Were they ads? Were they continuations of content on the page?
Jared Spool and Jakob Nielsen both have articles about the fold being outdated.
What do you consider “important” stuff? That seems like a pretty broad term.
Thanks for the comment Steve. I was just going over one of my clients sites yesterday and looked at their traffic from March 07 to the end of August. They had over 300,000 absolute unique visitors during that time. Looking at the site overlay, there wasn’t any links clicked below 700 PX. This is similar to the site I am talking about in this article.
I am not only talking about site elements like navigation. EVERY link below the threshold of 700 PX, NEVER was clicked. Links within text, links in pictures, none of them were followed. The fact is content below the fold is there more for search engines than people, but I would have thought that at least a few links would be clicked.
The majority of first time entry visitors are quickly scanning the page, trying to find what they are looking for. Since we designed the home page for usability, all products and services were listed in plain view and above the fold. So really there wasn’t any need for visitors to travel below the fold.
I read a lot of Jakob Nielsen as well, and agree that some usability rules are outdated. Since most visitors that are hitting blogs are more advanced users anyway, they are willing to do some scrolling to find what they are looking for, or to finish an article that they find interesting, or to comment.
A website that sells products or services is different than a blog. Important information like the types of products and services the site has to offer, phone numbers, major navigation elements should be above the fold. It is better to have product categories broken down in easy to scan lists, then to have all the products within a category listed in rows that drive the user to scroll. BY using deep link navigation and common sense it is pretty easy to lay out a site so the most important content is above the fold and in the forefront.
As far as what is important, that depends on the site’s purpose. If it is to sell products, then the product types and how to buy them should be the focus. Every site is different, but the fact is, visitors behave differently now then they did even 2 years ago.
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