Metafluence

Good footer

I was talking with Diggles yesterday and we were looking at sites we like. We both agreed that the new Pownce site is beautiful: Great use of colors, I love the way photos break outside of their containing box, and good use of stock imagery to save on cost while nodding to the community. Diggles was also sharing about how much he likes the new CNN.com. He was especially liking the footer. That’s when it occurred to the both of us how important a footer is to a site’s design.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve long know about the importance of a footer and have been paying attention to designing them well for a long time. However, I didn’t realize it as consciously as I did after last night’s conversation. I’m now going to actively check out the footer design on site’s I come across as a tell tale sign of a good site. When you’ve thought about a site deeply enough to have a well designed footer, it’s likely a higher quality site.

Good footer examples

Here’s a list of a few sites that I think have well designed footers:

CNN

CNN’s footer feels well thought out. Nice use of space to eliminate a cluttered feeling. I also feel like the links are logically grouped and I didn’t need headlines to understand their associations.

Threadless

A juicy set of options that feel like they got the same design love as the rest of the site. It’s easy to see the options that have emphasis and icons help me understand what the rest of the links are. I have a big love for small type for things like copyrights, privacy policies, and the like.

Digg

I love me some stacked links. I like the hoody on the right. The dual lines of legalese in a de-emphasized light gray color feels neat and clean flanked by the beautiful Digg logo. I miss the icons for the Labs projects, though.

Hemingway Theme

This was one of the first (if not the first) blog themes to leverage an over-sized footer. This free WordPress theme has inspired many more bloggers to use the footer for “about” info, categories, and external links; which used to be placed only in a sidebar. Nice job on this footer Kyle.

Pownce

I do like simple clean footers when the site itself is simple and clean, which is the case for Pownce. They do a nice job of using a single line of links with the only exception as the bug reporter, which makes sense for the age of their site. I like the generous use of padding below the last bit of content in the footer.

What do you think about footers? Are they an indicator of a good site design? Have any sites you think have good footers?