Huge Headers and Page Content

There has been something of a dichotomy in web design lately. One school of thought says that people like really big headers, with sliders or slideshows. Another school of thought uses an older theory, that site visitors shouldn’t be made to scroll to see the site content.

 

VisitPhilly.com is one of the sites I always show to clients to illustrate the first school of thought. It has an absolutely gorgeous Home page, with an enormous slideshow.

I measured, and there are about 575 pixels of vertical space before the site visitor can see the page content. Even on my 1920×1080 monitor, in FireFox there are four side links hidden under the fold.

 

 

 

Halliburton.com is in my view, one of the most “corporate” looking sites out there. There are only 392 pixels from the top of the page to the bottom of the header. And since the buttons are at the bottom of the header, all of that is visible without scrolling.

On my 1920×1080 monitor, in FireFox I can see the entire page, down to the top of the footer.

 

 

 

So, looking at the site in an arbitrarily chosen 640 pixel window (statistically, most people don’t view websites in full screen mode), VisitPhilly.com site visitors will see very little content other than the header and the three nav buttons at the top of the slideshow. 

And since the site uses a lot of sidebar buttons, none of them are visible without scrolling.

 

 

Halliburton.com though, allows a lot more content to be seen above a 640 pixel “fold”.  You can see the entire header, all of the navigation, plus the most important articles.

So obviously, this is a much better example of keeping Home page content above the fold.

 

 

But neither site is terribly new, they’ve both been around for well over a year. So what will the trend be? In my opinion, I HATE sliders! They were really cool at first, until every WordPress template in the world included a huge slider. I don’t want to distract site visitors with arrow buttons to navigate through the sliders, I want them to focus on the content of the page.

I love design and great artwork as much as anyone, and I wouldn’t be called “conservative” by many people.  But as far as web design for business, I believe that enormous sliders have become so commonplace that the “wow” factor is already starting to fade.  

And if content is indeed king, shouldn’t that content be visible to people with lower screen resolutions?