WordPress Design Inspiration 3 - for Blog Footer Design

WordPress Design Inspiration 3 – for Blog Footer Design

17 Dec, 2010 | mayank

Image credit – Mike Goldberg
"When you do not know what you are doing and what you are doing is the best — that is Inspiration." ~ via Quotationsbook.

Just like Blog Post Footer Design, the footer of the blog is equally important. It can be used to maximize the benefits at various levels like increasing page views, giving information about author, links to important pages, copyright information and lot others. Unfortunately, footer is often ignored as comments and the reason is same, it comes below the fold and is often ignored by the visitors and thus ignored by the webmasters too. The reason we’ve italicized “often ignored by visitors” is because its not always ignored by them and so as a webmaster, you shouldn’t ignore it too!

Blog footer can be used for various purposes although, its been recently that we’ve started seeing creative stuff happening around web page footers. Facebook started the trend by placing commonly used areas as taskbar at the bottom of the page, they later integrated the chat in that area. It was refreshing change and some entrepreneurs used this idea and the world saw the rise of Wibiya & Meebo Bar.

This blog post isn’t about these services, however these services definitely help in improving the way the footers were treated. Even though Darren’s stats were not encouraging, it seems that he’s loving the toolbar as the toolbar is still active on his photography blog.

Coming back to the point of making the footers useful and just like our earlier posts in WordPress Design series, we’d list some of the most beautiful and inspirational footer designs for WordPress blogs.

Blog Footer Design Inspiration for WordPress Blogs

Like Blog post footers, footers can be used to showcase various features to increase the interactivity, page views, seo and to display not so important but still required features. Let’s check them out -

1. Author info box – A reader will convert in a regular reader, if they know about the person behind the article they’ve just read. If you are the only blogger then you can display your information in the footer.

2. Various Links – Footer can also be used to provide link to other sites like other blogs in a blog network, affiliate links to various products that you promote, contact information, social media profiles, important pages like sitemap or privacy policy etc.

3. Featured/top posts – Footer area is a great place to display featured or top blog posts. Since those pages will be linked from every page of the blog, their ranking in search engine is likely to increase.

4. Facebook fan box/twitter stream – Facebook fan box and Twitter stream boxes take quite some space of the webpage. Some prefer not to show them in sidebar, so in those cases Footer becomes the obvious choice. It’ll also ensure that the boxes will not be obtrusive.

5. Tag Cloud – Tag clouds are important for the improving the SEO as it improves the overall navigation and internal linking of the pages in a blog. However, tag clouds aren’t liked by all the bloggers as they look little bit cluttered, in those cases footer is the right place to display tags.

These are some of the prominent and most used features in the footer although the footer is not limited to these features only. You can have whatever you want to make it useful and beautiful, probably take some inspiration from these inspirational footer designs -