What Happenend to: “Above the Fold?”

Scrolling is Back!

Everything changes right?!?
Well it really does and in this high tech world everything changes even faster. What was hip, cool or industry standard a year ago might already be dead or unrecognizably altered today.

Same holds true for “ABOVE THE FOLD”. Designers wanted websites – especially Home Pages – to reveal their entire message right there on your screen. Scrolling was not an option. It was frowned upon … in severity. So we crammed everything possible “Above the Fold”, Sites were centered on the page with expanding “Sidebars”.

Here it comes: Personal computer (desktop) sales have declined in 2012, the first full year since 2001!
Mobile is on the rise. Tablets are stealing the show: 100 Million are exprected to be sold this year, thus outperforming PC Desktop sales.
So, users are being reintroduced to scrolling – yes with their fingers but scrolling nonetheless. They do not care as much anymore, plus of course your mouse now has scrolling integrated. When you look at an Apple Mouse it even does not have a scrollwheel anymore but is operated by TOUCH.

The second reason is found in the fact that there are so many devices out there and designers had to take action with Responsive Design. Responsive Desing makes it possible to display one website design on all devices (more than 600 and climbing) currently on the market. The site is constructed flexible and adaptive thus eliminating the need for different sites for different devices (Read also: 2013 IS THE YEAR OF RESPONSIVE WEB DESIGN & DEVELOPMENT). The responsive design makes it necessary to scroll cause your content is organized in boxed sections to adapt for different screen sizes.

So get used to scrolling thru websites again and heat up your mouse-scroll-wheel. Lets see how long this trend lasts 😉