Mark Celsor

I’ve had a several clients over the years who were obsessed with having everything “above the fold” on their web pages. The practice of trying to cram all the calls to action, links and advertisements in the top 400 pixels of a page not only can result in a cluttered page designs but it also doesn’t take into consideration visitors natural reading patterns. When a user hits a page, the first thing they usually do is scan down (past blinking banner ads) to find where the content starts and then they quickly decide if they are on the right page. If they aren’t then it’s usually POW! they hit the back button. If you’re lucky they continue to read down the page. The ads, navigation bar and all the other clutter at the top of the page are completely ignored. Web browsers tend not to read everything on a web page from left to right starting at the top left corner and clicking on the first thing they see. This might have been the case back in the 14.4 dial-up modem days, but today pages load up a lot faster and users are a lot more savvy and economical with their web surfing time.

This morning Guy Kawasaki wrote a post linking to an article titled “Demystifying ‘Above the Fold’”. In it the author talks about placing links and advertisements at action points instead of jamming them all at the top of the page. If you think about your web visitor’s behavior patterns, there are a few key points where they pause to decide what to do next. This is where you need to offer calls to action. For the common scenarios above you might have success offering links to related content immediately to the right of the content’s starting point. That way if the user felt that they hadn’t gotten to the correct page, you have an opportunity to offer them something different before they hit the back button. You also have an opportunity to continue the story with engaged users by offering them calls to action at… GASP! the bottom of the page or part of the way through the content for when they’ve gotten the basic idea and are ready yo move on.

For a rude awakening about how people really read web pages, watch this eye-tracking video that Seth Godin put in a blog post about two years ago:

Wild stuff!