Importance of website footers

By: Tanya Jones

Website footers are one of the most ignored elements of a site. Not many site owners give a lot of importance to them. The footer is placed at the bottom of the page and will be seen last by anyone who visits your site. This also means that it gives you one last opportunity to make the person visiting your site take some action that will be beneficial to your business before he/she leaves the page. How your footer looks is not the only thing that is important. What is also important is what it contains and how it can add to your site's performance.


There are various elements of a website footer. Some of them are given below:

Site Map

One of the most crucial things that you should include in your website footer is links to all the important pages of your site. If your site has a form based navigational structure, then the links given in the footer can become the main navigational links for different search engines. It would be best if all of these links contain keywords that link back to the respective pages. Most sites use the footer like a small sitemap. The footer can not only have links of product and service pages but also links of other pages as well. If the footer cannot be used as a sitemap, then the site owner can at least place an HTML link of the sitemap in the footer.

Content

One of the latest trends is web design is to add a feed of the newest content of the site on the footer. It could be in the form of a blog feed, tweets, new articles added to the site or any other kind of content. Adding content on the footer has many plus points. Since it is added in the footer, it will not take away from the focus of the page and will keep the visitor's attention on the main content of the page till he/she gets down. The other advantage is that fresh content will get added to the page if the feed is added to the footer. This will help your site from the SEO point of view.

Social Media Buttons

The world is moving towards social media and it has become very important for business and personal websites to take social media seriously. You may include your social media profile on the footer of your site. This will let your visitors share the content from your site to their other contacts.

Call to Action

A visitor to the site reaches the footer after going through all the other content of the page. At such a time, if the website does not guide the visitor, it may lose out on a potential customer. The footer will be like the user's last chance to take any kind of action. Action could be in the form of signing forms, transactions, buying products or sending an inquiry. The call to action button can be placed on the footer.

Credibility

Many times a visitor may not know what to do after he/she has gone through the entire page and reaches the end of the page. It can sometimes help the visitor to take decisions if you have your social media icons and call to action links in the footer. Besides this, the footer can also be used to gain the trust of your visitor and build credibility. Any BBB Accreditation safety certificates, membership to industry bodies, testimonials, awards and any other such things can be placed there. If these are put in the footer, it will help your visitor take a decision about your site if he/she has any doubts.

Contact Information

Your contact information is another vital thing that can be placed in the footer. The contact information will help to convince your visitor that the website is real and not a hoax.

Legal Information

A good footer will also have any legal information about the company. Things like the disclaimer, privacy policy, legal declaration, information regarding copyright can all be placed in the footer of the site.

A footer is a very important aspect of the site. It not only contains legal information regarding the site but can also be used to highlight any other important aspect of the site. Ignoring the footer of the site can take away a lot of value from it. Similarly there are many other aspects of web design that cannot be ignored. As a business owner or the owner of the site, it may not be possible for you to keep all these aspects in mind when you design your site. You can get distracted by other aspects of your business development and can skip a few aspects while creating your website. That is why, it can help to hire a professional web design company who has experience in designing various websites and who will keep all the important aspects of web design in mind when creating your website for you. Since the company only designs websites and does not have to concentrate on other aspects of business development, they will be able to create your website for you keeping all your business needs in mind. This will help you take one thing off your mind and concentrate better on other aspects of business development.

Tanya Jones is a staff writer for Flying Cow Design, a company that provides quality medical web design services.
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