Getting started with above-the-fold content
The advice here is unglamorous, which is probably why it gets skipped. A short on-ramp to above-the-fold content for teams who have not touched it before.
Design decisions are the ones clients feel most confident arguing about, which makes it worth separating taste from evidence early. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.
Why this earns attention
Visitors decide in seconds whether to keep scrolling. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.
Your first week
- Find out what is already in place
- Say what you do before you say how special you are
- Change one thing and measure it
The fold is a range, not a line, so do not cram. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.
In practice
Consistency is the quiet half of design work: it rarely gets complimented, and its absence is noticed immediately. Three things worth confirming about above-the-fold content before you move on:
- Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
- The fold is a range, not a line, so do not cram — and you know whether that is true here
- There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped
If any of that sounds like a description of your current setup, it is fixable.