[IxDA Discuss] intra-page links and the (mythical) fold

[Bryan J Busch]

I'll open with a firm conviction of mine: there is no fold. Web pages  
don't fold. Newspapers fold. Common browser window sizes make for  
interesting statistics, but I'd never recommend designing for just  
one. There, that's out of the way.

My real question is this: when people in the web design business talk  
about items being "below the fold," and the web page in question uses  
a #link to skip to the bottom of the page, where the majority of the  
site's navigation lives (example: http://powazek.com/), does that  
content count as being below the fold? Technically, the visitor  
didn't scroll to get to it, and neither did the page reload. In all  
of the usability research I've read, this technique is never  
mentioned, but things like <a href="#content">Back to top</a> are as  
old as the web itself.

Does anybody know if researchers like Jakob Nielsen just never  
encounter this sort of thing when they have hundreds of test subjects  
using thousands of web pages, or is this behavior simply ignored when  
tallying data?

Bryan J Busch
play: http://theynow.com
work: http://geniant.com