If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Not so many months ago a quick ray of light blinded the www and mainly the web standards community… new, smart and innovative uses of screen real estate. A perfect example of this can be found in Powazek’s footer. He even wrote a little article on it.

I recently changed jobs and am now working for a design firm as a graphic designer. Screen real estate is very important. Especially when building corporate websites. Once I walked through the doors on my first day, I was reminded of this once again…..and again….and again. Which makes perfect sense.

“Above the fold” is a term I now use and live by which means keeping the bulk of the content , especially the most important, above the 420px mark. Which means that ‘above the fold’ is assuming that everyone viewing a website has their screen resolution set to 800px X 600px.

This is done to keep the site as accessible as possible for the most possible viewers, even though others might have a higher resolution set. This way, by default, everyone can still view the most pertinent information, without having to scroll for days. And when you add in the navigational bars and tool bars that browsers have, there is even less real estate available.

I particularly have one large monitor. My resolution is set very high (1680×1050px). Therefore I have tons of real estate, which might make this seem bias. However, I agree with Derek. I think that if not now, sometime in the next generation of web design and development, as the way we build and perceive websites, real estate will be thought of differently. And on top of that, it will (hopefully) be thought of differently in a good way, by clients and everyday visitors alike.

If I put myself in a client’s shoes, I would want all my content (logo, slogan, about us blurb, navigation, etc etc) all as close to ‘above the fold’ as possible also. But when I take the client’s shoes off, I particularly like whitespace and my content spread out without having to have cluttered, thick borders separating a books worth of content ‘above the fold’.

So if you are a designer, building something for a client, ‘embrace your bottom’ as Derek once said. Be “riskay” and propose a non-cluttered example of real estate usage by utilizing all of your assets, like the footer.

And if you are a client, be a little more open to new ideas and get excited about being in a new wave of companies on the internet that don’t have the traditional, table-based, cramped, content-overloaded website. Your visitors will thank you.

So in light of Derek’s post, when your planning your next design, or planning to get your next design, think outside the box if you will…think… “below the fold” too.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Get GetANewBrowser delivered to your inbox