Make sure that content you especially want your visitors to see on the page is visible without scrolling. That means putting it no more than 400–560 pixels from the top of the screen.
Don’t take this to mean that visitors won’t scroll. They will, especially if they can see that there is more content below to scroll to. But there is still power in making sure that the first thing they see on the page is the thing you most want them to see. Placing a large picture—or ViewMaster—at the top of your page can make additional content on your page invisible to users. Hiding this content makes it less likely that users will see it, and less likely they will scroll down to it.
About the 400–560 pixel figure: as of January 2010, the two most common screen sizes among visitors to our website were 1024×768 pixels (29 percent of visitors) and 1280×800 pixels (27 percent of visitors).
Given the typical sizes of taskbars, docks, toolbars, as so forth, anything more than about 560 pixels down is going to be “below the fold,” i.e., not visible unless you scroll. For users with an 800×600 screen (about 2 percent of our visitors in January 2010), only the first 400 pixels will be visible.
