Web Design – Above the fold; Lessons from an online retailer
You have 580 pixels to convince the visitor, use it or loose them.
By Rod Jacka
Panalysis includes amongst its clients a number of online retailers (I hate the word "etailers") and one of our clients is about to embark on a major redesign of their website.
Being well versed in web analytics they thought that they would use their regular meeting with me to ask questions about what they should do during the redesign process and what they should look for in the "stats". The meeting went well with lots of discussion and action items to follow.
Later after a little reflection I decided that the single biggest problem with their existing layout wasn't the look and feel but a combination of the merchandising and what the visitor were shown on the page when they arrived at the site. When we were viewing their existing website and the proposed new design, I noticed that quite a large amount of the key elements of the page weren't visible in the first screen when viewed on my laptop.
I can't emphasis enough that first impressions are extremely important and in the world of web analytics one of the key variables that professionals look for is the "bounce rate" of the pages within a website. The bounce rate (more on this in a later article) is the ratio of the number of visits who only view one page on your website to the total number of visits to your site. Though it is difficult to generalise on this issue, in most cases a high bounce rate is an indicator of poor performance.
When we examined the appropriate reports across a number of retailers we found what seems to be a correlation between the size of the end user's screen and the bounce rates on key merchandising pages. I will be the first to say that this may be only one tiny contributing factor, but it raised an interested question – will visitors take the time to scroll on a landing page if the offer is partially or totally below the bottom of the screen?
To test this we examined the minimum screen resolution of the majority of visitors' browsers to a number of ecommerce related websites. Whilst this was only a small study it seemed to be consistent that around 70% of visitors to the website had a maximum screen height of 800 pixels or less. I then did some calculations with our very handy screen ruler and a couple of common web browsers and found that in a typical situation your pages need to get the message across in a screen height of 580 pixels or less.
The reason for this figure is based on the following:
My tests indicated that around 168 pixels are lost at the top for the buttons, navigation, tabs, toolbars, etc. You also need to account for the taskbar and bottom of the browser which causes you to loose another 52 pixels. 800 pixels – 168 - 52 = 580 pixels. And this is assuming that the browser is maximised to the full screen!
Having a limit of 580 pixels to get your key messages and product merchandising across is a challenge but not an insurmountable one. It doesn't necessarily mean that we need to have everything visible in the top 580 pixels of the page, but rather the key information and products that let the visitor know that there is something interesting here and that there is more to follow.
To organise an assessment of your website, please contact Panalysis sales.
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