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Footers are becoming an essential strategy to engage visitors. Leaders in the industry are moving toward implementing effective footer features and creating a place for presenting, displaying and branding to their audiences in a very personal way by providing intuitive nature.
On the search for effective integrated footers we collected a few that are amazing for creating engagement to produce internal traffic and brand awareness. We present you an alphabetical order list of 15 Footers with viable integration.
1. Department of Spanish and Portuguese
2. Biola University, customer service at glance
3. Designer Wall, a resource of inspiration and Design News…
4. Far from fearless, a well implemented flickr section, “How not to” steal browser window space.
5. Generation Church, despite the original design a holy experience literally speaking!
6. Giga OM, Malik once again ahead on the game… brand, brand, brand
7. John Chow, recently updated blog, the real sense of giving, links to MyBlogLog profiles for visitors, blog roll, and a source of money making opportunities. why is he evil?
8. Pop Sugar, well planned branding strategy with access to the entire network and feed subscriptions to all their blogs.
9. Powazek, what a footer should look like, BTW Derek is going to be one of the speakers at O’Reilly’s Tools of Change 2008.
10. PR Blogger, reaching information in one place, very smart way to present a stream of events and information.
11. Problogger, Darren always in the game, another recently updated blog like very much his new layou, the Home page is a little busy to my taste, However Darren dear friend you excel with this footer.
12. Read Write Web, Simple and minimalist, keeping the reader on the spot!
13. Simple Bits, fellow bloggers are making the news and they will continue, featured in almost each design blog, Phenomenal Design.
14. Speak Light, the only product website that we feature on this showcase, essential and smart.
15. Tennessee vacation, well featured category section.
Nice list of footers. I’m going to look further at each footer and model my site’s footer after one of them.
Footers are a great way to utilize mostly unnoticed space for SEO and just for fun creativity.
I must say, your footer is quite nice and functional as well. :-)
Thank you for the compliment. I think more and more as the internet evolves and readers expertise become a common ground, the best way to give a clean and neat space to readers is optimizing all other areas surrounding the content it self.
A nicely designed footer with proper content can surely improve the whole experience of using a web site. I really like the way sites are embracing and evolving the concept of the footer - what once only served as copyright space is now becoming an area of equal importance as the main content itself.
thanks for the post, Hector - there are some nice examples in there.
I’d love to see a bit more discussion of each - why they’re set up that way, how they work for visitors/search engines etc.
I look forward to reading more of your stuff,
daniel
You left out your own footer.
Looks mighty pimp to me! :)
The footers are very useful and help to improve the design :)
Nice list! I’ve been working in a new design to my blog. This list will be very useful.
I made a similar list, but focusing creative headers. I invite you and your readers to look: Most creative website headers.
Your footer could have been on this list as well.
Great list. i will put one of them at my blog.
Nice list! Footers are something I tend to skip over with web design, but I suppose these let you get straight to the content first, then scroll down to navigate. (Probably stating the blindingly obvious there!)
Don’t forget Merlin Mann’s recently redesigned 43folders.com which has a pretty functional footer
I think this is a good idea. But I wouldn’t be surprised if the adoption was very slow amongst blogs, for two reasons:
1. hyper-concern about the loss of “link juice”…most often, these resources are tucked away on separate pages, such as About and Resources…but by using them site-wide, you are adding a ton of outgoing links on each page…and reducing the PageRank impact on the few links normally contained in blog posts and the like. I’m not defending this kind of thinking…just saying that I think it’s likely. And I wish PageRank would just go away…it should go back underground, to be used for…whatever Google uses it for.
2. The vast, vast, vast majority of blogs aren’t really about helping people anyway. I’d say that less than 10% of blogs in existence really provide value in the first place…thus, they are about self-expression (a completely legitimate raison d’etre) or tools devote to link manipulation and keyword domination (not legitimate)…but neither of these functions really has to do with meeting people where they are, and helping take them to the next level in whatever topic the blog covers.
Chuck,
1. “Link Juice” secretion isn’t a problem if you aren’t one of the handful of people left on the web who still believes pagerank matters.
2. People looking for information on how to promote their sites might find your -not legitimate- paint brush a bit wide. If someone wants more website traffic and you have a blog that teaches them how to get it legitimately, then a service has been provided no matter how that information is sponsored.
The idea of connecting sugar network´s sites that way is great.
Just because you can dump in all that information at the bottom of the page (footer) you should. By having a spiffy design for it, it doesn’t justify it either.
Most of these designs dump in all this information where it would be more appropriate to use an archives or sitemap page instead! That is what they are for.
As far as the “SEO” argument, I do not buy that at all because it is repeating the same (similar) information on majority of the pages of the site and therefore it is impacting documents uniqueness and cluttering up with repetitive information. Again this would be better served in more appropriate pages like archives or sitemaps.
If the user is not going to make use of all this information on every page it certainly doesn’t belong there.
Using yamle.com as an example:
“recent entries”, “recent comments”, “most commented” need not be mentioned in every page. Use the homepage for that! Use “related articles” instead because it is useful for the user and it has a close relationship with the document the user is reading.
“recent projects” can have its own section as well.
Some of the sample designs however do make use of useful information for the user. That is having proper usability in mind.
It is true. A footer is a most under utilized means by which focus and direction can be focused on a webpage. Often users fly through the internet much like a person watches tv hunts with the remote.
Such footers as used as examples here draw the eye to the bottom of the page, keeping interest so that the user may stay at that point and the webmaster has a greater chance of a greater and more intense page views and counts
Sarven Capadisli,
There was a time when websites were only text and links, then sidebars became mayor players on the game. Before there was a section for everything from links, archives, categories to popular links, then slowly the sidebars make their magnificent appearance.
Footers will come to be a standard on web design, usability and engagement. Good catch about the related articles!
thanks por la visita a mi blog, man! veo que manejas muy bien el español… o muy bien el ingles!!! excelente punto que abordarse sobre los footers, yo hice en días pasados sobre las invitaciones a suscribir al rss…
Be careful an extensive footer can also create a lot of noise, what can be distracting.
Footers are great ways to show users the depth of your site but they shouldn’t be used as a crutch for good Information Architecture. Too often you see better organization in the footer than you see in the primary navigation.
Nice collection there Hector. It’s good to see designers being creative with footers and not just shoving the old Copyright text in there.
@Hector Jarquin
Adding irrelevant information at the bottom of every page increases clutter and page size, goes on the other direction instead of having true unique documents and it also does not let the users get a better picture of site’s structure.
Usability in the footer area could certainly be improved but in my opinion the sample Web sites above are going at it the wrong way. Eye candy plus mass of irrelevant information does not equal good usability.
Great list.
Definitely something I will come back to next time I’m designing a theme.
Cheers.
before time we pay more attentions on the toper and now its the footer’ s turn:)
Nice list…
Just out of curiosity and unless I overread it: What have been the exact ways to assess usability here? (How) did you measure performance and user satisfaction?
great list of footer styles… something well worth looking into when it comes to my blog redesign.. awesome post!
Like, Jens Meiert, I was wondering what exactly is the usability based on in these examples. I agree, they are all wonderfully designed and contain valuable information in relation to the site, but by usability what are you basing it on? Also, I think that John Chow’s looks like a zillion other blogs out there and Tennesse vacations is too cluttered for my taste.
Amazing selection!
Funny, but I think John Chow’s footer is the best above. Simple and minimalist indeed.
I like the idea of the naming search box “Ask a question” on Biola University page. I really wanted to ask a question :-))
Great list of footer styles. Footer must must live, no to be debris.
This is really cool One. and What about mine http://www.prapdesign.com (LoL).
I have to agree with some of the comments above. Too much at the bottom can add some clutter and slow page times down. But, the examples of some of the above serve as excellent references for clean, simple and usable. They typical concept is to dump the unwanted things at the bottom. Making the footer a resourceful area can always be beneficial. People will look at the bottom of a page, even if for a split moment, make it worth their while.
http://www.joebailey.org
i like the concept, and the one here on your site is huge, but serves its propose init
A great summary about footer. I want to start my own blog this summer and your article help me ;)
Ralph