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Designing for the web can often be a tricky task, there are many variables to take in account, some of them of technological nature, some of them of human nature. The fold is something that involves a little bit of both.

What is the fold?

If you’re not familiar with the idea of the fold on web-design, we could say in a nutshell that it is the area of the site that your users will see without having to scroll, therefore, making that region very valuable. Now, calculating how big that area is, is a slightly more difficult task, it involves screen sizes, resolutions, browser type, operational system, how many toolbars the users have, and so it goes. But we’re not going to go that far this time, the point of this post is to argue that the fold may not be as important as it’s been said.

It is commonly said that users won’t scroll bellow the fold or won’t pay too much attention to the content bellow that line. I would agree that to a certain extant. I can’t deny that for most of the sites that area is the most important. That is the first impression you user will get, so there are some important tasks to accomplish on there such as:

We have just launched the new Bushmeat.org web site for the DC based non-profit Conservation International. As per our last blog post, the site involves migration from the Plumtree CMS to Drupal.

We conducted an information architecture analysis on the site and also made some major modifications to the site design. Our information architecture analysis, identified areas where users can easily be lost while navigating the site. Based on the findings, the navigation structure has been majorly updated.

The biggest challenges that we faced while working the project include:

1) A majority of the documents on the site reside on the Plumtree system in a file folder structure. These documents do not reside on a database and therefore cannot be easily exported. A lot of these files need to be manually migrated and added to the Drupal CMS.

For a lot of our Drupal development projects, developing web site wireframes and information architecture is the first step in the process. A lot of web developers use Microsoft Visio or OmniGraffle as their wireframes tool.

At Appnovation, we have been using a tool called Axure RP for creating wireframes. Axure is a tool that is specifically designed for creating web site wireframes. As a result, all of the tool bar elements are strictly catered towards the web design world. We really enjoy working with the Axure for a number reasons:

1) Drag and Drop Elements
Using Axure, a web designer can easily add form elements and place holders to the page. Since all of the tool bar elements are designed for creating web site wireframes, there is no need to search for the right icon. This is the case for Visio since there are so many different elements available on the tool bar.

2) Export Wireframes as HTML