I'm partly in agreement with the lecturer as I recently created a website with a photo driven navigation bar ( http://www.theheadmasterbradford.com/) and this is very quick and easy to use on a phone, but I also have a smaller navigation bar as well. I believe that above the fold is very important, the home page should have information on what you do and a call to action, and cater to people with a 5 second attention span. Also remember that the landing page from google is not always the home page. If someone lands on a secondary page they must still be a call to action somewhere above the fold.

And no to contradict myself. How many people have iphones and ipads compared to people who have laptops and desktops? I think we are getting ahead of ourselves, there are designers who are designing sites more for portable devices than personal computers because they want to be seen to be designing for future technology, according to my google analytics for my site less than 6% of visitors are from phones and ipads. We need to stop buying into the hype.