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arlojamrog:

Whoever made thereisnopagefold.com doesn’t seem to want to deal with reality.  Sure, scrolling is something that happens nowadays but to me, the content below the page fold is akin to whatever-happens-after-a-first-impression.  So, above the fold is a valid concern.

Sounds like a person experiencing client requests for the first time.  Things that suck below the fold?  Navigation bars (@dbox knows about this one).  Breadcrumb trails. Logos.  About-us-in-a-sentence.

Just in the way a box of cereal has a front and a back, scrolling pages have a fold line.  You put important stuff above it, and more dirty details below it.  With maybe another navbar at the footer, because users sure as hell don’t like adding insult to injury by scrolling back up to leave that really long page.

All valid concerns, but hold on for a minute here.

I would argue that ‘the fold’ (as it were) is irrelevant for things like navigation, logo, breadcrumbs, and intro sentence. I mean, if you’re worried about whether your navigation clears the bottom of your user’s browser window, your site design may have bigger fundamental problems.

This Below The Fold argument exists to combat other travesties. To name a few:

• Awkward amounts of information columns (and the oft-misused horizontal scroll)
• Stingy pagination limits
• The extremely defunct (but still very prevalent, especially with design portfolios, for some reason) fixed-height, centered website with its content in scrollable divs.

Love your browser window. Use the organic motion of scrolling the whole damn thing to your advantage. That’s all. Nobody’s saying that you have to put your navigation 3 wheel rotations downfield.