http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/blasting-the-myth-of

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I think that some of the comments here that relate to various page heights are missing the point. The issue is not how high the page is, but whether the elements on that page finish in a straight line or are staggered. If some elements are longer than others, then any that continue beneath the fold will become obvious – creating the lure.

Good work bringing this up. Something I’m tackling with a design at the moment and I hadn’t thought to make explicit in the desing brief. Now I shall!

They suggest that you finish each page with an unfinished sentence so that people have to look at the next page to finish the sentence they are reading.

eg “On the art of writing copy”, Herschell Gordon Lewis, page 160 in my version.
He says that newspapers do this when they break up items. He claims that ‘readers demand completeness’. ‘If you leave the reader in mid-sentence , you’re in command’.

There is simply no way of guessing how deep the “fold” of the visitor’s user agent is and I am pretty sure that none of the examples had the “cut-off-look” on purpose.

That said, if you wanted to ensure that the visitor gets informed that there is more to come you could put an overlay with CSS and JavaScript over the bottom with a “more” arrow when and if the browser viewport is smaller than the document height. That would be a real incentive. A shame that people only use these things for advertising like sitepoint.com does.

You’re right in that the browser windows aren’t necessarily how other users may set it. (It happens to be how I keep my windows and I wasn’t thinking about it when I quickly grabbed the shots.)

That being said, it doesn’t matter. Watch users as they scroll down and you’ll see they stop when they hit a horizontal rule, aligned boxes, or large amounts of whitespace.

So, even if it doesn’t naturally hit the bottom of the browser right off (and so often it does), any sort of faux page bottom is likely to stop users from continuing.

And, as usual, if you find users on your site don’t scroll no matter what, then you should keep your pages short. It never matters what we find in our studies. It only matters what’s happening on your site with your users.

The fold line on a maximized 800×600 resolution window could be anywhere between about 350px and 430px. Seems like an awful lot of variability to account for.

Any ideas?

For example, take a look at the screenshots above. The main toolbar buttons are set to “small” size with no labels. The favorites bar and address bar are compacted into one line, as is the Google Toolbar.

If a user didn’t have all those toolbars squished together, there’d likely be 50 or so extra pixels to bump things down, probably enough to push the Cognos.com example down far enough to cancel out the “cut-off” of the image.

I don’t think that a vertical bar does the job — it is too unobtrusive. If you have a page full of text like the NYTimes, you are ok (and that gives you a nice opening to talk about how a rich link page like thomas.net automatically has the cut-off look) but not all customers can go that route. Hints?