Sliders and Content Above the Fold

[RobertFisher]

I was just inspecting a wire frame that is going out to a client and realized that the slider may interfere with the "content above the fold." Can't believe this had not struck me on others.

If the Header has basic business info, etc. in it and you place a slider to display images in the area just beneath the Header or slightly down from it, does that decrease the amount of content seen a being above the fold? Or, is content above the fold established by virtue of H1,2, 3, etc.?

[DougRoberts]

The main considerations here are:

1. How is the slider interpreted by search engines and how the presence of a slider affects the interpretation of the page.

Accessibility of the text/content of the slider and how this content may be affected when the search engine tries to determine the relevance of the page.

If google is looking at the areas of a page and applying weightings etc (there's been a number of articles about the ratio of content vs ads for instance) then are you pushing more valuable content further down the page to a less important position and how much of a difference does this actually make.

How different is this from putting a picture at the top of an article/page (although normally the H1 would come first)

It would be interesting to test two copies of the same page - one with the slider above the content and one below to see what difference it makes.

Does the position of the

in the html make a difference?

2. From a user experience / conversion perspective - how effective are the sliders.

I completely see your point about selling product. Yes, putting your goods on show to communicate to the visitor that this is what you do and how great they are makes total sense. When you're a professional services company using a slider to present generic "values" against stock photos then maybe it's not the strongest approach!

How important is the fold to humans? I've read a number of times about how the old advice to put everything above the fold because users don't scroll is outdated advice and that people are more than willing to scroll down. I think the caveat here is that there has to be some sign/scent that they're going to find what they're looking for by scrolling down.

[RobertFisher]

Thanks for the response Doug. Is there anyplace you have found as a resource that supports this above the fold delineation? I am with you in that it seems reasonable (but I grew up with newspapers ;)) My thoughts are that with the algorithm there would need to be some mechanism to measure that bottom of header - top of footer area [maybe character or word count] and then to calculate that and apply a factor to the content that is weighted higher than a similar factor for the second half. 
It would certainly be easier to game if we new bottom of header to beginning of H2 is 'top of fold' and when there was no H1 or H2, etc. there would be full credit given to page in total. (Then, again, we are at the measure by equation versus placement).

As to the slider, If I am doing a professional practice or a product producer, etc. I try to stay away. With companies that sell a service or product that "look" is a big appeal, it really is helpful. We use a lot of CMS (WordPress, Joomla, Drupal) and test a lot of sliders. Typically,  by the time a plug in slider makes it near the top of the heap, it has been fairly well tested. Slider issues today typically revolve around browser updates and we have standards in place regarding updates due to the impact a failure can have on a client.

We only update after there has been time for the update to be in the marketplace (truly varies so we break it down by type of update). If it is a browser we might well wait 4 to 6 months to see what bugs get worked out. We then test all on the site once updated so the problem is not a surprise. But, again, I rarely see problems with them.

Thanks again,

[DougRoberts]

Yep, there's a real risk that the slider is going to push more valuable content down the page and potentially below the fold.

"The fold" is not determined by header tags or anything like that, it's purely down to the window size of the browser. Different people are going to have different fold positions based on their screen size or their preferred browser window size so you can't be absolutely sure where the cut-off position is going to be.

I'm not a big fan of sliders. My worry is that they get stuck at the top of the page to create something visually interesting / dynamic rather than think about justifying the slider's place on the page.

Does the slider help clearly communicate the proposition / offer or idea being presented?

You want visitors arriving on the page to feel as if they've found what they are looking for rather than starting a treasure hunt...

Is the slider content indexable then you can treat this as content above the fold and optimise accordingly, but you've instantly placed stylistic constrains on yourself!