

Revisiting "The Fold" - bdfh42
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001307.html

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KWD
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.

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SlyShy
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.

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

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

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futuremint
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.

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mncaudill
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.

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carbocation
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.

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req2
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>

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JeffJenkins
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.

