Shelby Thayer — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 15:20:47 GMT

Nice article Milissa. I completely agree that people are scrolling more, although I’d say that we should pay close attention to the goal of the page in question when talking about the fold. In Jakob’s most recent book “Prioritizing Web Usability” he mentions that on homepages (those that mandate a scroll), only 23% of users do so. On internal pages, the scrolling % jumps to 42%.

Also, I know we’re talking about web sites as a whole here, but for any company that is serious about SEO, we also have to talk about landing pages. According to the recent MarketingSherpa Landing Page Handbook, fewer than 50% of their testers scrolled the page. The biggest culprit for killing the scroll for them was actually text size. They said that the smaller the text size, no matter where the fold was, users almost never scrolled.

Anyway … my two cents. Thanks Milissa. I, too, think you should write a post about utilizing the bottom of the page. You know what they say about lists (especially SERPs). People read the top and the bottom, but not the middle!

Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Shelby Thayer