Footer in profile and full face

Footer - it is also a "basement", it is also "legs", it is also a structural element of the site. What are his special features? What functions does it perform? What is inherent and what is alien to footers? We will answer these and other questions in order.

Common features

In order to scroll through the page of the site to its logical end, users do not have a seditious thought that they strained their fingers in vain while scrolling the mouse wheel, place useful elements in the footer. Frequent guests of web resources are accustomed to seeing in the footer of the site:

• contact information;
• sitemap;
• year of creation of the site;
• attendance counters;
• social media buttons;
• information about the creators of the site;
• copyright notice.

Distinctive features

Less popular, but also common footer elements are:

• repetition of site navigation;
• Tag Cloud;
• RSS feed;
• links to articles;
• latest comments;
• vacancies;
• photo, illustration.

Special signs

It should be remembered that layout elements are not very popular, often they are not paid attention at all, especially if the footer on the site is nondescript and featureless. The elements listed above are not equivalent. Some are useful, others are optional, and others just waste space. For example, a copyright icon or a formidable exhortation that the site owners will damage the attacker for copying materials from this resource - a useless thing.

In fact, copyright arises on its own almost magically immediately after the content has appeared on the site. On the Internet, reminding that stealing is not good is Sisyphean work.

The footer often contains elements that for some reason did not fit above, but you should not go to the point of absurdity. We have already seen a lot in our lifetime, once, for example, we found a search bar in the footer - that's such a surprise. Another surprise is photos with information about the company's employees, it's even a shame that there was no special section or page for them on the site.

A separate topic is the placement in the footer of the site of an e-mail newsletter offer, vacancies and links to the most popular sections. The click-through rate of this information is very low, so it makes sense to conceive something more useful and interesting for the footer. Menu duplication is justified if the pages on the site are quite long. Most often, linking with the most read sections of the site is practiced on forums and blogs in order to keep users on the site and make search and navigation easy and unobtrusive.

Contact information is primarily important for online stores and sites providing paid services, so that the client can easily place an order and contact the company.

The main rule of the footer is not to overdo it. Illustrations, links, tags, counters - everything should be in moderation and to the point. It’s great if the footer on the site is interesting, noticeable and informative; it is unsatisfactory to make a site within a site out of it. The "footer" should be a continuation of the style of the entire site, and not dictate it.