Footers usually repeat the primary navigation and contain anything that is considered “the fine print,” such as copyright information and a privacy policy. With the rising popularity of standards based design, they also have become the home for xhtml and css compliance badges. While doing a redesign for a new client of mine whose website lacked a footer entirely, it occurred to me how footers had become a faint afterthought when I put together a design. My footers are typically content barren and don’t get a whole lot of design love. The most content-rich footer I ever created was probably for Avatar Financial, which contained a miniature site map and a bit of contact information. This made me curious – what are other designers doing with their footers?
Below is a list of 19 sites I gathered from around the web who have footers that caught my eye. Some are aesthetically pleasing, some offer atypical forms of navigation and functionality, and some just plain work well. I linked directly to as many of the footers as I could, but some of them didn’t have ID attributes so you’ll have to scroll down. Finding these was actually quite a bit more difficult than I thought it would be, so if anyone knows of any other sites with killer footers please share them in the comments below.
