Essential design elements of an effective website footer include scaling the font, including only necessary links and adding a call-to-action for users.
As a continuation of The Importance of Your Website Footers Design (Part 1), the following is some additional information regarding what you can do to make your website footer as engaging and compelling as possible. While Part 1 focused on why website footers are such an important component of a website’s overall design, here in Part 2, we will take a closer look at specific design elements that can really make website footers pop and that, in turn, can compel users to take an appropriate course of action (whether that be to contact the firm, read more of the site’s content, etc.).
Design Tips for Website Footers
Some specific design tips that can help create engaging website footers include (but are not limited to) the following:
- Scale the font of the text so that the most important text has a larger font
- Select color choices for the font and the background that effectively contrast without being too jarring to look at so that the footer text is as easy to read as possible
- Always include contact information (or a “contact us” link), as many users will intentionally scroll to the bottom of a page simply to find the easiest way to contact a business
- Include a discrete number of links in the footer and omit any unnecessary links that will confuse, frustrate or otherwise repel users
- Consider adding a sentence or two that describes the company (this can even include a “read more” link that takes users to a more in-depth “About Us” page)
- Include a “Follow Us” button that will allow users to engage with your company’s social networking pages (e.g., Facebook/Google+/LinkedIn pages).