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Yesterday we showed a client the draft version of a new website they asked us to build for them. Building the site was an interesting experience for us because it marks the very first time that we've built a site that wasn't designed for a screen size of 800x600.

That may sound strange because bigger screen sizes have been around for years and neither Steve nor I can remember the last time we looked at anything on the Net using that screen size. But then we're not your average Internet surfer ... and nor are you.

Even though we have been looking at the Net through monitors set to much larger screen sizes for years most people out there who use the Net have not and you would be crazy to design a business site that's not going to provide the best experience for all of a site's potential customers. Forcing them to scroll to the right to see everything has long been considered to be one of those things that lessens the ‘experience' and so we've stuck to building sites that looked good in 800x600.

Recently though we took a look at the stats for a number of our mainstream sites and the number of people hitting those sites with their monitors set to 800x600 had reached the point where it was time to think about a change and this new site provided the excuse we were looking for to make the change. Of course, when you make a change in the screen resolution the position of the fold changes too and we all know how important it is to keep things above the fold don't we?

You don't know how important it is to keep important information above the fold? You don't even know what “the fold” is?

Well don't feel bad if you don't know what “the fold” is because there are a lot of webmasters out there who don't. ‘The fold' is a term that comes from out of the past and is something that newspaper editors know all about. The term refers to what appears above the point at which newspaper readers fold their paper and ever since newspapers became big enough to fold editors have known that the most important information needed to go above that folding point otherwise people may not see it.

For webmasters ‘the fold' was the point at which surfers had to scroll down to see more and here the popular wisdom has been that people don't like to scroll so you need to put all your important information above the scroll point. Banners and advertising needed to appear above the scroll point otherwise they wouldn't attract many clicks.

So as you move to building sites for larger screen sizes you have more room above the fold to play with. But what if surfers are beginning to forget about the fold? What if people are actually more willing to scroll these days than they were in the past?

That may not be as silly as it sounds and a recent study in Europe found that people were prepared to scroll if the information on the site was relevant and engaging. In fact it seems that this study may have also turned up another change in surfers' on-page behavior. More surfers in this study were losing their focus on the top left hand corner of a page and a typical heat map for a web page, one that shows how popular the left hand side of a web page - above the fold - really is, was changing shape. Not only that but more heat was showing up below the scroll than was expected.

When they compared the click through rate of a banner that appeared above the fold with the click through rate for a banner that appeared lower down the page there was no huge difference as we all might have expected in the past.

One small study does not prove anything really but it certainly is worth thinking about because the people's attitude towards scrolling may just be beginning to change and we need to be aware of what's working and what isn't.

And while we're speaking of being aware of what's happening around the Net; have you looked at iGoogle lately? iGoogle is the personalized home page that every surfer can have thanks to Google and they are becoming quite popular.

Now some experts are beginning to wonder if Google isn't about to turn iGoogle into its very own social network. Of course, if it does then we marketers need to be there to take advantage of the sales opportunities that might open up for us. So there's another possible change that we really need to be watching.