In the television and newspaper industry, there is a standard format. For television, you know you will be getting a thirty-minute or an hour-long program, and :30 commercials. With newspapers, you know what stories are on the front page, above the fold.
But as more businesses migrate to the InterWeb, lucrative websites are being built to fit the most technologically- functional formats. The problem is, it is hard to predict what type of browser size your visitor will be viewing your website with. That makes it hard to determine what on your homepage will be seen “above the fold” and what is scroll-worthy.
Computers come with different size monitors and browsers will not always be full screen, not to mention that some folks will have tool bars taking up more precious space. If your call to action statements and ‘click to buy’ buttons are too far down the page, many visitors may not scroll down and see it.
To help website owners understand how visitors see their websites, Google has created a tool called Browser Size. The tool is based on a sample of data from visitors of www.google.com. Google used special code that collected data on the height and width of the browsers from the sample. I used the tool for www.volacci.com and our results are below:
For any given location in the browser, the tool will indicate what percentage of users see it. If you have your call to action in the 70 percent region, that means that 30 percent of your traffic will have to scroll in order to see it.
This tool can help you organize your homepage with more visibility for driving more traffic to your conversion-oriented pages. If you are web designer, you can use the Browser Size tool to redesign a webpage in order to minimize scrolling and make sure the important elements are always prominent to your visitors.