By Cheryl Salazar, The Partner Marketing Group
We all have our quirks and I have my fair share, no doubt. I guess that when I poke around on websites I get either lazy or frustrated with trying to find what I’m looking for. Why organizations feel that they have to bury everything in the top navigation bar is annoying to say the least. When that familiar feeling pops up, I automatically scroll down to the footer. A footer is a valuable piece of website real estate. Here’s why:
A spot for your Publisher logos
Do you represent so many products that your website is starting to look like a badly decorated Christmas tree? Organize them neatly along the bottom and you’ve added white space to the necessary spots on your website. And you can now consistently present your partnerships throughout your website in every footer.
Navigation clues
Organizations will often include a site map in their footer. While this can be quite ugly, depending on how you lay it out, it’s often a more direct way for the visitor to find the page they’re looking for vs. hunting and pecking through the top navigation bar.
A library
A library is a place where you find information in many different formats. If you use that same analogy when thinking about your footer, you logically have a place to highlight key pieces of content that may not naturally fit in other areas OR that you want to bring attention to. Think about this area as a place to include search functionality, a series of articles or blogs, or even a special offer.
There are some great articles on the web, here are some examples to start with.