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Oh wow has this ever been a totally mixed up Thursday. Here it is, almost three in the afternoon and I am only just starting Thursday's column .... am I ever glad I live on this side of the International Date Line and not on the same side as you guys in the United States. If I didn't live in your tomorrow the editor would definitely not be happy.

Fortunately I am a day ahead of you guys so all is still well .... well it will be when I finish this column and when I do that I'll be able to go out and play with our new SUV that we picked up today .... so the pressure is on to get this written.

Isn't it funny how there are times when someone mentions a subject and then .... for a short while .... everyone is talking about whatever that subject was? There may have been no crossover or connection between the people who are suddenly thinking about something but for a while that subject seems to be in the forefront of numerous people's minds.

That's the way it seems to be with the discussion about the 'fold' that's going on at the moment. I've mentioned it several times in the last couple of weeks, and so have a number of other people, but there's a new and interesting report out about that constantly moving part of a web page and it's worth going back and looking at the subject again.

In case you've missed all that discussion and don't know what the 'fold' is let me tell you that the 'fold' is that invisible line that people have to cross if they want to see what's on the web page if they scroll down. For a long time the popular belief was that many people don't like scrolling so they never see what you might have on a web page that appears below that line that we call the 'fold'.

And that really wasn't too hard for web designers and webmasters to deal with at first because there was a lot of real estate above that line. When screen resolutions were 640x480, 800x600 or 1024x768 you could design a page that incorporated a lot of important information above the 'fold' and back then people tended to migrate to newer screen resolutions almost en masse so you could keep up with developments. But then along came widescreen monitors and laptops with a variety of resolutions and it's become very difficult to decide where the 'fold' is.

If you believe that people aren't prepared to scroll below the 'fold' then you've got some real issues to deal with. How do you fit all that important information above the 'fold' .... wherever it may be?

If you don't believe in the 'fold' and people have to scroll to see all of your web pages then are you perhaps missing out on some important sales because people are missing your sales and marketing messages?

I have to admit that Steve and I are somewhere in the middle in all of this. Our point of view is that if people are looking at your web page on a PC and they can't see any good reason to scroll down further then they probably won't. People may act a little differently if they're visiting your site via a laptop or some other small-screen device but then again, maybe they don't.

So into all of this confusion comes a report from two people in the United Kingdom who claim that the idea of the 'fold' is a total myth. In a report on the web called 'The myth of the page fold: evidence from user testing' they claim that they have user-testing results that refutes the idea that most people don't scroll. And I have to say that some of their arguments in favor of the idea that most people do scroll is interesting .... but the heat map that they have produced certainly does leave me wondering.

If you stop and think about the heat maps that most experts have produced over the years that are said to show where people look on a web page you will recall that the hottest parts .... the parts where most people look .... are down the left-hand side of the page .... and the heat maps are fairly cool when it comes to any part of the right-hand side of the page.

And why is the right-hand side of the page important to this discussion about the 'fold'? Well if people are going to scroll to see what's below the 'fold' then they need to look at the scroll bar and if the idea of the 'fold' is a myth then there should be a very hot spot on the heat map over on the right-hand side of the page where the scroll bar lives.

In all the heat maps that you've seen have you ever seen a hot spot on the right-hand side of a web page?

I certainly haven't so that leaves the proponents of the idea that people do scroll with one large hurdle to get over. If they scroll then there has to be a hot spot on the right-hand side of the page and .... lo and behold .... the guys who claim that people do scroll have produced a heat map that shows a serious hot spot on the right-hand side of the page.

Now I'm not crying foul here but I am suggesting that until more than one researcher comes up with a heat map that shows hot spots on the right-hand side of a web page we should not presume that people scroll and we should still attempt to put all the text and links that are important to us somewhere above the 'fold'

And of course, where the 'fold' is all depends on what screen resolutions the majority of visitors to our sites are using to view our web pages.