Does Your UX Suck? Principle #4: Company Logo Is Prominent and Company Information available.

The position of the Logo
Below the fold is the area below the view area. To get "below the fold" means scrolling down after the page has finished loading. A few years ago designers were making page heights specific to monitors sizes and it was not good form to make people scroll, left, right or down, but responsivity (websites that go to phones and tablets) and the many various screen sizes that websites must now perform on, have changed all that. The latest websites are built to scroll in every direction.

So the conversation about what is appropriate for positioning 'below the fold'  has become an important feature of UX. It is agreed that below the fold is NOT considered a prominent area, which seems an obvious thing to say, but I have had clients want to move their company logo from top-right to below the fold. The company logo should be placed in the prime real estate of a webpage, that's the top. Keep in mind that Google can't read image Banners, so you'll see less and less of them on the net now. With the release of HTML 5, which is the standard about to be released by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the structure of the page is being given specific tag names that Google is geared to watch out for. If your logo is an image it should be named in a SEO friendly manner and be siting where Google expects to find it, top. The logo image will not be a banner, the image length will only span the width of the logo and the extra space will allow other important company text.

Webfonts are a very exciting development for future websites. Websfonts are a library of funky fonts which allow designers to build text based logos on a webpage, rather than image based ones. This will be great for SEO as Googlebot will be able to read a logos content, but Webfonts aren't stable yet and can drop back to a plain old default. Logos should look the same where ever they show up and most companies would not like the idea of their logo changing it's style on an older browser. If you would like to see a webfont in action visit Snap2 SEO, our major headings and our logo is webfont, 'Matiz'. I allow webfont in my logo because I am more interested in Google's ability to read my business name. It's ok with me if it drops back to the default font of Arial on some older browsers.

UX gurus agree the Main Navigation needs to be above the fold also. The main Navigation buttons are the primary access points to the rest of your site, there may also be Secondary Navigation. The Primary Navigation needs to be obvious from the get go and that's above the fold. The Secondary Navigation is ok to put below the fold.

What should be 'Below the Fold'?
I've seen sites with so much top real-estate given to paid advertising that you couldn't distinguish the company logo, it was swamped by other company's advertising. For your logo to have Prominence your logo has to stand out from the surrounds. Google will wonder about your Credibility if he sees paid advertising above the fold, so advertising definitely should go below the fold and should never be near your own logo.

Company Information can go 'Below the Fold' The Company Info which includes the address or contact details can go below the fold, in fact, usability experts suggest that it helpful to have it on the bottom of every page. More lengthy company information can go on the About page and usually gives a visitor the complete story of the company, all they need to know about the company, the staff and even their commitment to quality.