What's a footer?
When we pay attention to most generic websites we find on the internet, we can analyze that there are certainly three main parts that make up a site. These are the pillars which hold a website when presented to the user. Those are the Header, Body, and Footer. Given that our attention span is quite low compared to the early 2000s, we tend to skip sites where we can’t actually find what we are looking for. Hence, there emerged a tendency to grab the user’s attention in the first few seconds of a visit to a site, by making the Header look much cooler than it used to be. We came from static, boring landing pages to animated, flashy landing pages as a result. Consequently, the attention paid to ‘well-designed’ footers faded into nothingness. Yeah, it may be exaggerated, but that’s the gist of what happened.
You may ask, “why do we need a footer?” or “what’s there in a footer?”. Let’s pay our attention to the second one first.
What should be in it?
A footer is a place where we can find the branding of the site, Quick links, Socials or Contact info, CTA/Newsletter, Privacy statement, and even Blog articles. You could say it is the summary of the site to view from afar.
The need of a footer?
So why a footer? As I said in the previous section, it contains the summary of the whole site. A well-designed footer can give answers to almost all the questions a user may have like, “what’s this site about?”, “where can I contact them?”, “where’s the about section?” and so on. So another reason why we need a footer is that it is kind of a safe place for a user who’s lost on a site, he/she can always rely on the footer to guide them through the site. It’s the last thing a user sees of your site, so it should be given the same treatment as the header to give a sense of consistency to the user about your site.
This might have made you change your perspective on footers as a whole. So long live footers!