At every Pubcon at which I’ve done a community building presentation, master community builder Brett Tabke has emphasized the importance of getting real community content as high on the page as possible. Brett is the architect of WebmasterWorld, the Web’s busiest webmaster community and one of the most successful topical communities on the Web. What he means is that the community’s real content - actual posts by members - should be as high on the page as possible. This means that the space devoted to logos, headers, banner ads, navigation bars, announcements, sticky threads, etc. should be minimized. Brett’s advice is very simple, and very frequently ignored. I was reminded of this by a recent post by search marketing blogger RustyBrick, which takes the Search Engine Watch forum redesign to task for adding more intrusive (and taller) advertisements. He notes that the redesign moves the content from about 400 pixels from the top of the page to 630 pixels. For the relatively low percentage of visitors still stuck with an 800×600 display, that will push the content completely below the fold. In fact, on my late-model Toshiba laptop, when viewing a thread page all that was visible was the name of the poster of the first post - and that was with a couple of the toolbars I often use closed. This inspired me to check a few other sites, and to ask those of you who run communities, “How high is YOUR junk?”
Before getting into the analysis, I’d add that guessing what your visitors will see isn’t completely obvious. Screen form factors are changing, with quite a few widescreen laptops and monitors being sold that have lots of pixels but limit the vertical height available. Another variable is toolbar usage - just about every site seems to offer a toolbar for some purpose or other, and a user running just a couple of these tools can whack quite a few pixels off their vertical display height. Then, there are the users with big, hi-res displays that surf in smaller windows. It’s ironic that almost all discussion of screen resolution in web design forums focuses on content width. While it’s true that users are far more accepting of vertical scrolling than horizontal scrolling, the placement of the “fold” gets short shrift in these discussions. One other caution is that the page layout a community visitor sees may depend on their status - a new visitor may get a welcome message, ads may be suppressed for members who pay a subscription fee, etc.
So, on to junk height… We looked at a variety of community sites, went to a typical thread page, and measured the distance from the top of the page to the top of the post content area. We included content like member name, post date/time, etc. in the junk portion. We wanted to measure the distance to where the visitor would be able to start reading a post. The tests were done using a 1280 x 800 display, so there shouldn’t be any height added due to a too-narrow window squeezing the content into a taller configuration.
SEO/Webmaster Communities:
WebmasterWorld - 325 pixels
DigitalPoint - 336 pixels
Cre8asite Forums - 445 pixels
WebProWorld - 495 pixels
SitePoint - 535 pixels
SearchEngineWatch - 570 pixels
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| Shortest Junk: WebmasterWorld |
Highest Junk: SearchEngineWatch |
Brett Tabke seems to be taking his own advice, with WebmasterWorld weighing in with the shortest distance to member content. And RustyBrick’s take on the SearchEngineWatch redesign is on the money, as they exhibited the highest junk bloat of the communites we checked. DigitalPoint has potential, though - by using a side-by-side format for user profile info, DP could have cut their junk by about 50 pixels, for a super-model thin height of 285 pixels.
We looked at a few other communities to see how they compared to the presumably design-conscious webmaster sites. Gaia Online, probably the busiest community on the Web with a billion (yes, with a “b”) posts isn’t bad at 380 pixels. IGN Boards, a very successful community for gamers with more than a hundred million posts, allocates only 320 pixels for its “junk” before getting to the good stuff. Digg isn’t a forum community, but gets your (or your friends) news items in view a mere 250 pixels from the top of the page - not bad, and perhaps one ingredient in Digg’s success.
I could go on, but you get the idea… successful communities don’t fill up the whole first screen with ads and boilerplate. Got any interesting findings or observations on how communities do a good or bad job of limiting junk? Feel free to post a comment.
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