In my own experience, when I moved the buy button and price info to the very end of the page, my conversions went up a considerable amount. The reasoning behind it was that people needed to be engaged (and sold on features/benefits) before realizing that this is not a free product and bouncing automatically.
The goal of the 37signals fold is to grab attention and try to lock in interest. They are fully embracing the concept and importance of the fold.
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.
I agree, the 37 Signals page doesn't disprove the value of the top fold. The argument for content above the fold was never entirely about people not reading below it (even for newspapers). It's about above the first impression you give to a user and enticing her to stay engaged. There's definitely benefit to getting certain information across in that first impression when they land on your page.
Exactly. Above "the fold" should be what is needed to draw the user into looking further down. A squashed up mess of many details and buttons/links, which is what often follows from following the "everything above the fold" rule, is not going to do that.
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).
I don't see the 37 signals site as a great counter example. Their main products are on a 2x2 grid above the fold, with an intro paragraph beside them.
And the 'call to action' elements at the bottom of the page are a reiteration of the products at the top.
It's a nicely designed site, but I wouldn't say it puts essential material only below the fold.
Not stressing too much the above-the-fold concept does not mean there is no difference between up and down the conceptual line of the average screen height resolution of your visitors.
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.
It seems like the backlash against "the fold" has been taken a bit too far. Yes, we know that people scroll. But it's still essential to have the important parts of your site visible in the three seconds a user takes to make a decision on whether to stay on your site or not.
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.
If this is true about the Google fold that has got to be one of the most stupid things I've heard them do.
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?
This is probably just an iteration on earlier methods of prioritizing a page's content.
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.
Straw man. No reasonable person has ever said that you can't have content below the fold. The point that good copywriters make is that you have to grab the visitor's attention, and the best way to do that is to have the attention grabbing material where the visitor can immediately see it. It's not complicated, controversial, or even worthy of discussion.
I have worked with (and for) many people who considered themselves "reasonable" and did. Vociferously. Ten years ago the web was awash with articles claiming that no-one would read anything under the fold.
Thankfully, in this age, evidence-based testing has triumphed.
It is worthy of discussion because it's still often misunderstood to mean "put everything valuable above the fold or people won't see it". A basic point, but one that still needs hammering home, especially when you get out of the silicon valley set.
That's actually what he's arguing for. Instead of what he has been seeing that many people are misunderstanding the concept to be "cram everything above the fold, no matter the cost".
> "cram everything above the fold, no matter the cost"
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.
This seems to make sense, except whenever i've seen analytics for time-on-site, it seems like the vast majority of people spend less than 30 seconds on pages. People's attention spans aren't automatically better while using the web despite the lack of a physical fold, i'd guess that they're probably worse if anything.
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.
The subtle bit here is that he "hook" needs to be above the fold. The content, not so much.
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.
There's too much flawed logic in this guy's arguments. The most convincing argument could be made by showing, either via heat map software or eye tracking analysis, that a vast majority of people who arrive at 37 Signals' landing page make it to the bottom of the page. I think if he did this, he would actually make the opposite conclusion as I've seen almost every time in the dozens of tests I've run in the industry. This does not mean that long landing pages aren't effective (they can be very effective), just that he's wrong in that most people read beyond the top fold; there's can definitely be a significant and often precipitous drop-off.
I think the idea of the fold might means different things to different designers. "Above the fold" is really "Your first Impression". If you have a good first impression, chances are you'll stick around, if not you might leave.
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.
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.
Yeah you make some excellent points but I'd say forget that for a moment and think of the countless books and articles and blog posts out there that are spewing the same information over and over. I see a ton of professional, established web design firms still designing sites like its 1997.
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.
"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."
I'm more worried about the width. This nice-looking page doesn't fit my ~1000px in width while it should. All the content is within my view but I still do have a vertical scrollbar. That's quite a distraction. But what is even worse is that the text is snapped directly to the left edge of the page. Not even a single pixel of a space. Try resizing the tab to see for yourself.
I agree with this to an extent. When I visit a website, I often skim the top of the page and scroll down immediately to get to the meat of the content. The fold is not meaningless, but worrying about a good design is significantly more important than worrying about "the fold".
I agree completely with the article, however I wouldn't hold up 37signals of an example of it "well done", I think their page is way to long and heavy and putting their calls to action at the bottom, dumb.
This means nothing without quantitative evidence. If you've watched the page evolve, you would have noticed that they've varied their length greatly as they've tested for conversions. Not saying they have the greatest page, but many times what you may think is "too long" or "dumb" - when tested quantitatively - often proves otherwise.
That's actually part of his point. He's proposing that you use the space to "build up" to the good part. I agree with him that, properly executed, this would make better use of space, which would probably improve readability, (not to mention a more compelling package)
If he tried to pack all of his "content at the top", readability and usability would suffer.
http://www.devside.net/server/webdeveloper
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.