I have to be honest with you, I had a different plan for todays article but as I started jotting down notes for it I suddenly remembered how puzzled I was when I first heard some of web design terminology. I remembered my senior web design friends talking and me not understanding half of it. All I could talk about was how marketing works, how to design proper marketing brochure, how to make it attractive to a reader and so on.
But I could not talk technology with them, I was losing them with every sentence that was spoken.
So instead of writing the article I planned (by the way it’s not dropped, I just slightly pushed it further in my schedule) I decided to start introducing some of the web terminology. Even as a refresher for myself.
So we are starting off this week with FOLD.
What is this “fold” then?
Many of you have already heard the term in reference to newspaper design. Because of the physical dimensions of a broadsheet newspaper, it is folded. The first page of a newspaper is where the “big” stories of the issue are because it is the best possible placement. Readers have to flip the paper over (or unfold it) to see what else is in the issue, therefore there is a chance that someone will miss it.
In web design it is the position on a page where users have to begin to scroll in order to see the content placed there. Elements that are positioned “below the fold” are not seen when the page first loads.
For a very long time many people believed that it’s important to design pages that don’t scroll, although this view is most commonly now regarded as invalid since since the outbreak of blogs and websites with long pages we are now used to scrolling as part of our web experience.
Is fold significant at all.
In a way yes although not as much as it was years ago. These days we are well used to scrolling and even better, we know that certain content, if we want to access it requires scrolling (comments on blogs or references in online magazines and newspapers to name just few examples)
The general rule of thumb is that visitors should be able to understand what the site is about from the information included above the fold.
And this is where the main significance of the fold lies. In order to make the user to scroll down we first have to sell our website to him and we can do this only with content he can access the second he lands on a page.
The same goes for any ads or any important information you place within the layout, they will obviously have a better chance to be seen if they are above the fold.
Other than that fold is not as significant as it used to be but it is still something to remember about when you create your layouts.