Huge Footers Are Lazy Design

21st December 2011

Huge website footers are very fashionable at the moment. They’ve been transformed from an area to store your copyright and legal details into works of art with a vast array of links and calls to action.

But is this a good trend?

There are endless articles and list posts around that showcase the “xx Most Astonishingly Beautiful Website Footer Designs” – all of which seem to state how great it is that we now have such creative and original footers.

For example, take this article which discusses the Components of a Great Website Footer – check it out and look at the range of things it suggests can be included in a footer.

There’s 17 different items in total! I wont list them all, but they include a site map, a contact form, social media buttons, a search box, a newsletter sign up form, recent news, your latest tweets, a language selector, and a tag cloud.

If you check the comments on this post you’ll see a common trend – there seems to be agreement on the importance of using creative footers to enhance user experience and to ensure that visitors are exposed to everything on a site.

But is this actually a good thing? Is having a huge footer a legitimate use of screen real estate and does it really enhance user experience?

There seem to be a few primary motivations for having large and creative footers – one is that your footer should be a work of art – that it should look original and help your site stand out from the crowd.

Another is that designers want to ensure users are aware of all of the different pages on a site – normally through the use of a site map.

Many site owners also see the footer as an opportunity to include multiple calls to action – you can follow along on Twitter, get in touch via the contact form, sign up to the newsletter, and subscribe to the site’s RSS feed.

This is too much information! It’s going to overload users and reduce the effectiveness of each of those calls to action.

Any why include a site map? If a visitor has to scroll to the bottom of a page to look for a link some work probably needs to be done on the information architecture and navigation design.

Throwing lots of links and calls to action into a footer section is a lazy approach. By “spamming” visitors in this way the effectiveness of a page as a whole is reduced.

Take a look at the footer on your site. What is its PRIMARY goal? Are you overloading users with too much information? Do you really need everything that’s currently there?

Don’t simply follow the trend of having a huge and artistic footer – take the time to really consider what you need to include and only add what’s absolutely necessary.