How does the growth of tablet PCs affect your decisions in website design?

17 October 2012

Technology today has meant that everyone who owns a mobile phone or a tablet PC can access the Internet on their devices no matter where they are. No one has to use either a laptop or static computer to get online whether for business purposes or pleasure.

This has meant that many people who want websites built for them have to rethink just how they need to go about it. Web designers have been faced with the new challenge of where the ‘fold’ should appear on the smaller and larger displays that people use. Many website designers predict the death of the fold and have done so for quite a while now.

This is due to the fact that people who surf the Net no longer need to be on 19” monitors with resolutions of anything between 1024 x 768 and 1280 x 700. Screens today can be as small as those in iPhones or as large as a 60” HDTV. But it is not just the resolution that can be dramatically different as the aspect ratio of screens today can change by the slightest movement.

Whereas in the old days ‘above the fold’ was the area of a webpage where all the important information would appear and where eye catching imagery as well as the call to action buttons would be placed so that viewers did not have to scroll down the page to glean any information they needed to find, today this no longer applies even though in the past it was a matter of debate.

Today web designers have come to understand that the balance of a page is the all important factor as to how the page works. The fold still has to be adhered to, but the need for viewers to scroll down the page has gained importance in so far as anyone looking at the page discovers more things of interest as they go down it.

The top of the page needs to grab the viewers’ attention, but they then need to be encouraged to find out more information by being tempted to scroll down it. The point is that no one can now claim that the ‘fold’ is in a specific place anymore as there are too many variables which come into play for this to be possible.

Some website designers believe that the first fold should still contain the eye catching information but then there should be a second fold which would have an added bonus for those who are using mobile devices and tablet computers, and that by applying an approximate ratio instead of basing it on fixed pixel measurements, you would indeed be designing a relative effective web page.

People who surf the Internet today scroll down web pages, they have to so the tendency to automatically do this is greatly increased. This offers web designers a lot more scope as to where they place information on the page. The now common day use of tablet PC’s has opened the door to a new way of looking at webpage designs and therefore the whole concept of how a website should appear.