Vertical Scrollbars

The other day Foxy was looking for my site on the front page of the CSS Reboot and she said it was very hard to find. If you look at the site you will see that there are 50 thumbnails on the page, arranged in rows of 2. As you scroll down, the sidebars become monotonous and you no longer know where you are on the page. She described getting lost halfway to the bottom and she almost gave up.

Designers used to talk a lot about keeping content “above the fold,” which meant keeping the content above the bottom of the user’s browser window on page load. It has always been important to show the most important things to your user immediately, and so it was typical for sites to have concise body content that didn’t require much vertical scrolling to follow.

Modern sites (especially blogs), however, like to fly in the face of everything that’s considered good practice. While a reasonable vertical scrollbar is acceptable, there are a lot of sites nowadays that are so long that the scrollbar shrinks to a size that even makes it hard to click. This is not good practice at all. It becomes very easy for users to really get lost as they are digging into the content, and they will more than likely scroll back up and use the navigation links than continue digging.

Case in point: compare the latest CSS Reboot front page to Fall 2005 site. Isn’t it easier to browse the thumbnails on the old site, where the rows have 3 sites each and the thumbnails are smaller? I would say that the new site is about twice as long in height than the old one. And I think the voting on the front page is also an indicator that the length is proving to be ineffective; the votes dwindle as you move down the page, and dwindle by a lot. The only sites towards the bottom that have a lot of votes probably get those votes from people visiting from that site. Front page turnover for the bottom half of the list is lacking.

So take this as one example of why it’s important to keep sites short. There are a lot of ways one can keep a blog short; for example, the front page can feature excerpts instead of full posts, or the front page can just feature 1 or 2 of the latest posts. The point is to make the site a little less daunting, and make it reasonable for users to dig down the page.

(Note: This is not a criticism of the CSS Reboot site, just an observation. I would like for the Fall 2006 reboot to be more like the one from 2005, but it doesn’t have to happen. I’ll still support it regardless.)