www.dorkshelf.com

www.greatlakesbeer.com

It’s clever masking trick that I haven’t seen used anywhere else before. One image has both the black robot design and the grey zombie design and, because it’s layered on top of a background that fades from grey to black at the bottom, only the black design is visible on grey and only the grey design is visible on black. Above, you can see the two in transition. Well done, ThinkGeek designers.

www.ftbbeauty.com

Find out more at WordPress.org or watch the video below.

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The Fold Varies

An analysis of this site

Your fold is not the same as mine. There are a number of things that contribute to what content a user can and can’t see on your website without scrolling, namely: the size of their monitor, the size of the window they have open, their video card settings and their web browser. So while content could only be either above or below the fold on a newspaper, content on websites is much more varied in its visibility.

We design for people with basic setups — basic, but not ancient. It’s incredibly important that all users are able to see your content, that’s why any good designer will make sure your site looks just as good in the ten-year-old Internet Explorer 6 as it does in a modern browser. At the same time, your visitors shouldn’t suffer because they have larger screens, and so a middle ground needs to be found.

Take a look. This handy tool will show you a general percentage of how many people will see the content of a webpage without scrolling. Here’s an example using www.paulpritchard.ca.

People Scroll

If they’re there, they will look around. You’re not trying to convince someone walking by to purchase your newspaper from a newsstand, if someone has made it to your website then they will take the time to look around. Hell, I somehow convinced you to scroll down here to read this, didn’t I?

It’s as if users arrive at a page with a certain amount of fuel in their tanks. As they “drive” down the page, they use up gas, and sooner or later they run dry. The amount of gas in the tank will vary, depending on each user’s inherent motivation and interest in each page’s specific topic. Also, the “gasoline” might evaporate or be topped up if content down the page is less or more relevant than the user expected.

Don’t drain the tank. This analogy (from the article referenced below) reinforces the importance of really knowing your audience and what motivates them. If you know all the different scenarios of why they are there, then you will know what will keep them reading, above or below the fold. This is why websites that target everyone can overwhelm users, drain the tank, and end up targeting no one.

Some numbers. Jakob Nielsen wrote an excellent article about the fold and conducted a study that tracked the eyes of people browsing websites and measured the amount of time spent at different levels. The result? Users spent 80% of their time looking above the fold (800px in this study) and 20% below.

Be Selective

Not a good idea.

Everything is important, but what’s most important? You’ve taken the time to create some great content for your website but when you’re considering where it should be featured, always think about where it stands in relation to your other content. Should you be risking drawing attention away from the “Buy Now” button just to get your content featured?

Designer solutions. Design and layout are the tools that control where a visitor’s attention is drawn and a good designer will always create designs that reflect how important the different pieces of your content are. If the designer knows how important something should be, they’ll know how to get it the attention it deserves.

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The good ol' big smoke

An opportunity to move back to my home city of Toronto came up recently and, though it meant I would move away from the job security and the great minds and times at Industrial Media, I jumped at it as an opportunity to further pursue my freelance career.

A little over a month and a half in, I’m proud to announce the launch of a completely overhauled website for Vrtucar, a popular car-sharing company in Ottawa. As a member and frequent user of their cars, I brought an experienced viewpoint to the table and we worked together to tackle the issues I knew I and others experienced in the previous website. My thanks to everyone for the great feedback we’ve received on the website.

There’s also an exciting but top-secret community-based site in the works that really uses social media to its full potential and not just as the space-filler it can become as more and more ask for the buzzword.

And lastly, there’s the revamp of this website, a few years overdue but definitely worth the wait. While my blog previously focused strictly on web developer-related issues, I will be turning the focus to more design- and interactive-related topics. Enjoy!