Should I have a minimal home page or is it OK to scroll?
Eva Pettifor
I have often had clients request that their home page design is condensed to the screen so the user does not have to scroll downwards, I have summarised below why this is not necessary (or a good idea).
While it's a good idea to have important information towards the top of the screen, it is not necessary to have ALL of your content visible on the screen without the need for vertical scrolling. The idea is very old fashioned and comes about from the years old "entry page" which have a few boxes with an "enter here" link, which in itself is a bad idea for SEO.
Newspapers tend to put their main attention getting headline and story 'above the fold' which is where this idea originally came from, but websites are not printed newspapers and website usability has changed a lot since the early days of designing websites.
For years now it has been perfectly good practice to make your home page (or any other page on your website) a lot longer than the height of a computer screen.
- Scrolling is a positive thing and encourages your visitors to explore your web page further, most people expect to scroll as their hand is already on the mouse, usability eye tracking tests have proven this theory
- Having more information rich text content, particularly on your home page, is better for search engine indexing
- It only takes a second to scroll down, but takes a lot longer to click on a link to a separate page which will annoy your visitors
- Computer screens come in all sizes and resolutions (desktops, tablets, phones), so a page may fit 'perfect' on your screen will look different on someone else's anyway...
- Some white space in your design is more pleasing to the eye rather than trying to force everything in a small space
DISCLAIMER: The above advice refers to small business websites. In the rare event that you require a specialised landing page that does not
need to rank well in the search engines, is only for artistic purposes and has minimal content to be published, fitting your page content into a screen may be an exception to the above rule.
Copyright Eva Pettifor, Simple Pages. Please seek my permission prior to reproducing this article in any way but feel free to link directly to this page if you wish to promote this content - thanks!
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