Scroll or no scroll?

When I first began programming websites, around the same time as a started heavily using internet, I was told that a front page should never have a scroll. At that time, I bought everything I was told about developing websites. Because my lack of knowledge did not really give me any reason, so distrust this comment. A few weeks ago the statement came up again, I had not though about it for years, and this time a found it a bit absurd.

Let us say that this comment was made about 10 years ago, when people did not have mindset templates on how a website works to the same extent as now. I could see why the comment was valid at that point. No one was forced to try to find something on a website, and of course, by no one I mean people who were still new to the internet. Today with the amount of blogs that are available out there, it is almost weird to open a webpage that does not require a scroll. The though “is that all?” almost comes to my mind thinking about it.

However, I have been online for over a decade. How do people who are just beginning to use the internet think about this? Because, yes, there still are many people out there, who are not using internet and might not even have a computer. If they finally takes the courage to buy a computer, logs on to their internet, find my webpage is so confused that they don’t know what to do. Perhaps it’s a long shot that it would happen. However, my way of using the internet has totally removed all perspective that I might have for how people who might not be frequent internet users interpret a website.

What do they think of a flash page? How do they find what they are searching for online when there is so much information in just one individual website? How do I find these people and ask them?

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  • http://www.littleflutters.com/ Tash

    I like flash if it’s simple and doesn’t take more than a second to load. Otherwise, if it takes a lot of time and just looks fancy, I get frustrated and if it’s a site I’m mildly interested in I’d just close it and move on.

    It’s interesting that you should bring up this topic, I was recently making a website for a client that was adamant to not scroll. I over-ruled this as I thought “to scroll” is too critical nowadays.

  • http://www.littleflutters.com Tash

    I like flash if it’s simple and doesn’t take more than a second to load. Otherwise, if it takes a lot of time and just looks fancy, I get frustrated and if it’s a site I’m mildly interested in I’d just close it and move on.

    It’s interesting that you should bring up this topic, I was recently making a website for a client that was adamant to not scroll. I over-ruled this as I thought “to scroll” is too critical nowadays.