/Graphics/ Design the perfect footer
20/05/2009 | Filed under Develop > Graphics
Just because it’s at the bottom of the screen doesn’t mean it isn’t vital for creating an informative and stylish homepage. Elliot Jay Stocks shows us how
In the last tutorial we created a great-looking header for our fictional small business website. It followed an autumnal colour palette, using some elegant typography and some basic photo manipulation to set the theme for the site. We’re going to follow that up this issue by creating the footer to complement it.
If headers are the bold, striking elements that lead a user into a site’s content and give the first impressions, then footers might well be seen as the ‘parting thoughts’ of a website; a graphical bookend to all of the other elements on the page. They might not be very noticeable, but they’re there to do an important job.
Yet in recent years, footers have grown beyond their meek roots as places to stuff the privacy policy, page links and contact details, to become fully featured and bold statements of intelligent web design in themselves.
Not only that, but it’s now common for them to contain a large quantity of information. This isn’t just laziness on the part of the coder, however. Footers have become a useful home for content that’s better suited to sitting out of the flow of the body copy.
About the author:
Name: Elliot Jay Stocks
Site: elliotjaystocks.com
Areas of expertise: Design, CSS, web standards, Photoshop
Clients: WordPress, The Beatles
Favourite crisp? Sour Cream and Onion Pringles
Click here to download the support files
Click here to download tutorial PDF
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Comments
Bill Lowden / 23/05/2009 / 14:12 / http://www.delightfulwebdesign.net
Great tutorial series. I love using the tree in the footer. It adds some intrest without taking attention away from the content.
Jason / 05/06/2009 / 11:37 / http://www.brooksdigitalmarketing.co.uk
I love it. The big is beautiful idea really appeals and the space is a great opportunity to impart a bit more about your business or even introduce products and services.
From an SEO point of view you'd have to be careful not to have too much text as this could create internal duplicate content issues which are far more important to to Google than external duplications (I suppose if you made it a graphic then that would cover that though).
Jason
James Godwin / 08/06/2009 / 06:20 / http://www.creativresponse.com
I'll be honest I have never really spent enought time and detail on the footer but all thats going to change now,your tutorial shows a good example of how putting the effort and design in certain elements can lift the whole site.
Pete Campbell / 15/06/2009 / 08:46 / http://www.crearedesign.co.uk
I think this is a great little tutorial as it highlights the sheer amount of potential that is contained within a header. Whether it be a creative graphic, advertisements, a mini-site map or just for pure SEO purposes.
Jonathan Walker SEO / 02/07/2009 / 21:07
The footer is often very overlooked, which is a shame as it can really finish off the design, some good tips here!
Ayo Adigun / 11/07/2009 / 16:09 / http://blog.ayoadigun.com
footers are great for ramping up those keywords. as someone pointed out, be wary of duplication. through WP certain themes allow for different footers per page.
Martyn / 04/09/2009 / 17:13 / http://www.webdesign-gm.co.uk
Great article,
Ive been trying to design a decent footer for a while but gave up in the end. This might make me reconsider and try give it another go.
Thanks
Jay / 17/10/2009 / 19:27 / http://www.jayhughes.co.uk
I think that the footer of a website is often viewed as a dumping ground. Why not think your footer is as important as your menu? Great article.
Jeba / 09/02/2010 / 07:12 / http://www.jeba.in
Well, the big grungy footers are latest design trend. But it has it's own limitation, these footers can't go with all the designs. They should have matching header too, else they will look dead odd..
having said that..
the traditional footer's are still better than these big footers, because they are safe and will look good.
Big footers looks great on Portfolio sites, product sites (iphone related), web 2.0 services.. for anything else they are totally out of scope!
Web Design in Maidstone / 03/08/2010 / 20:54 / http://www.webdesignnet.co.uk
1) 1st and most important thing - footer should be visible
2) don't forger who owns the site when you make it (stay in shadow)
