Does Your Website Look Like You Think It Does?
Google has released a handy gadget for web site design last week. It’s called Browser Size, and it shows what most people see when they look at your web site. The results may surprise you.
Web sites are made by techie people (like us), and techie people spend a lot of time in front of big monitors with high resolutions. Sometimes, the result is a web site that looks great for people with big monitors but looks different for the majority of your web site visitors. Look at Google’s example:
The call to action–donate now–won’t be seen by 30% of the visitors to the site unless they scroll, because their screen resolution is low.
Naturally, I ran the test on our own web site.
While I was mostly pleased with the result (virtually all visitors can see our menu options immediately, which are the most critical part of our home page), two things stood out:
1. 30% of visitors won’t see any of the four key services boxes in the bottom left quadrant of the screen without scrolling, and almost 70% won’t see all four. These showcase how we currently talk about what we do. Making them invisible isn’t a good way to introduce ourselves.
2. 80% of visitors can’t see the sign up box for our newsletter without scrolling. Virtually no one! If we’re serious about establishing regular lines of communication with clients, prospects and partners, that box needs to move to a more immediately visible place.
Naturally all of this can be taken to an extreme. Having an element hidden from a small percentage of users until they scroll down is a reasonable price to pay for a coherent and appealing site design. Being “above the fold” is good, but not at the cost of all other considerations. Still, it’s good to know what elements may be less visible than you assume.
Try Browser Size out on your own site, and share what you learn below.
