On the Floor

We all say things like "designed from the ground up", but I wonder how often that's actually the case when designing websites. When starting a new website project, most designers will start with a very rough wireframe to plot out where the content will reside on the screen. I usually do this on paper to make it quick, and will draw a series of boxes and label them 'header', 'nav', 'main copy', 'pull quote' and so on. I've done this many times for many projects, but noticed that a) I always start from the top, and b) I've never really spent any time thinking about (or even drawing a box for) the footer.

When it comes time to produce the design in Photoshop, I'll throw in a footer, but often it's an afterthought. Sure, it'll include the usual suspects like copyright info, some brief contact info and maybe a text-based mini-nav, but that's about it.

This got me thinking - what is the real purpose of the footer? Does it even need to be there? Traditionally, I think footers in web design function in a similar manner to the first few pages of a book. In their most basic form, they will tell a user who owns the site, contain some legal information, the date of publishing and direct the user how to get in touch with the company. They might also contain navigation, which would be the equivalent of a table of contents.

Lately though, there has been a trend towards elevating the footer's presence - even celebrating it. Designers have been adding more and more 'stuff' into this often forgotten area of a website. Stuff like social networking links and blurbs, contact forms, photos, maps and even real content have been making their way to the bottom of websites in recent years. Although there is no real need for this added attention, I really enjoy seeing what some designers have done with this neglected area of a website. And why not celebrate this overlooked territory?

Being a designer, my favourite footer-trend is to use massive graphics at the bottom of a site. We've all been trained to scroll down when scouring through a site, so why not 'reward' the user with a fresh dose of graphics and/or colour? Take a look at the header of Vimeo.com - it's quite simple and unobtrusive.

Now scroll all the way down to the bottom of the site and BAM! On your way down you've absorbed some content, saw some neat things, maybe even clicked a couple of them, but then you reach the bottom and instead of just scrolling back up or hitting the 'back' button, all that work is made worthwhile with that whimsical illustration. The copyright and legal info are all still there, but the main focus of this footer is that rewarding image.

Instead of a 'reward image', another method of making the footer interesting is to seamlessly blend the footer into the content so it becomes difficult to determine where the content stops and the footer starts. This can be a good way to mask the 'boring' bits as actual content and keep the user reading right 'til the end.

Another technique is to use the footer as a sort of 'coles notes' version of the site. When a site as a huge amount of content the footer can be a useful place to summarize the site. I've even found myself skipping the content entirely and just heading down to the footer area hoping to find some brief blurbs, links and the like - something to tell me what the site is all about.

All this to say that I really enjoy this new trend of celebrating the often-forgotten bottom area of a website. And even though we view websites from the top down, having an awesome footer sets a solid foundation and to me feels better proportioned and structurally sound - like a skyscraper or a pyramid. I'm going to make a more conscious effort to place more focus on the footer of the sites I design - to make that space fun and useful - instead of just an afterthought.

If you want to be inspired by some remarkable footer designs, check out MephoBox and Pattern Tap.