“Sometimes (too often) you get to hear “all content has to be ‘above the fold’ or people will miss it”. I have always been very skeptical of this, especially when applied dogmatically. I’m convinced that most people who use the Web know how to scroll and will do so when necessary.”
(Source Article: Don’t fear the fold – people do scroll)

I couldn’t agree more with this study. Take a look at high volume “easy-to-use” sites. Ebay, Amazon.com, Microsoft.com, Apple.com, Nike.com, Walmart.com. Each one of these sites and a plethora of others have scrolling content.

Anytime some designer or “usability expert” that took a 600.00 course for 3 days says you must get all the content above the fold and avoid the scroll bar. They, quite frankly, have no idea what they are talking about. Most of these people either fall into two categories…

(A) They are print based designers and came from that background. Hence the word “fold” is a throw back to that point in time.

(B) They parrot whatever they hear and don’t bother to prove by experimentation.

Sorry to burst peoples bubbles and to come off rather high and mighty but scrolling doesn’t matter. Spend more time making a better application and less time worrying about that scroll bar to the side of the page. Encourage exploration!

I remember the days of my actionscript / flash development. I was a junkie and I really wanted to do a proper site in flex. But alas I turned away from linux and flash and tuned into asp.net and ajax. Seems kinda funny now that I might be exploring silverlight….

View the 3D Demo In Your Browser

I rather like this visualization for commits over a ghithub. Be useful to track visits trends and activity over a long duration. The other option is for collaborative intelligence to view clusters and search facets.