As web marketer Neil Patel points out, designing above the fold means something a bit different today for most aspects of web consumption than it did one or two decades ago. The 90s introduced many of these myths due to the lack of marketing data available at that time.

The “more is more” myth

90s websites were scrunched. Fonts were tiny. Many web designers were trying to allow as much key info up top as possible to combat this unappealing trend. As an above the fold web design progressed, the minimalist values of other areas of design came to factor heavier in site planning, since composition and whitespace create focus, whiler clutter creates blindness to detail.

The ultra-minimalist myth

Toward the later 90’s, some interesting advances in things like digitized art began to impact the world of web design and minimalist design became more appreciated. The virtues of white space and clarity resurfaced for websites. This was necessary, but it didn’t yet factor in the need for much of the stuff that was cut out. And all too often, focus was often not on a key business call to action, per se.

The “thorough website visitor” myth

In the 2000s, marketers began to track site and page performance and they discovered something. Visitors were skimming.

In fact, visitors were skimming everything. And they didn’t tend to look anywhere that visual cues were not standing out to beckon them. Colors, bold images, and even font sizes came under scrutiny. All this was for good reason. As web consumption increased, attention span decreased, and the values of advertising came to the forefront as a model for good web page layout design.

This was happening in the age of the dot com bubble, where many sites with overinflated (read: unexamined) market value propositions were falling by the wayside as bigger companies bought up the ostensibly successful websites as the market sifted through the rubble. Among this rubble was the fastidious website reader. In truth, the bounce rate for most search result links were and remain quite high.

The “all up top” myth

Some have been tempted to take above the fold to an extreme, with the idea that people never scroll. They scroll, but not unless you engage them up top. Naturally, a website needs to be scrollable, and there are differing philosophies on how to manage the scroll. The manual scroll is the most common, but many have opted for the modulated scroll, where the screen scrolls in entire, pre-focused portions.

The latter option is not a bad idea, but requires a lot of specialized focus on designing for the specific screen dimensions ratio of the device. While desktops and laptops are easier to modulate scrolling on, mobile phone dimensions have become divergent in the extreme and present more challenges. Responsive design needs to be uber-adaptable to meet the smartphone challenge of the 2020’s where smart phone screens unfold to wider dimensions and iPhone dimensions also get increasingly unwieldy.

How does one synthesize it all? Clearly, above the fold design needs to take into account all of these emerging truths and trends and then exploit them the best it can. But there is still an obstacle to that goal yet to be considered. It’s a problem that is currently still stumping many sites who are being stymied in many cases on visitor/reader engagement as a result.