The 7 best fat footers used on high profile sites
The fat footer seems to be a design trend for 2008 and rolling into 2009. They've very handy for giving users context within your site, offering another set of navigation to users or just for deep-linking for SEO gains. Here are 7 high profile sites that employ the fat footer effectively:
Problogger.net
Darren Rowse has an attractive fat footer where he offers information about himself (as the author), some useful resources and a push towards incentivised schemes. This is more a promotion of his primary purpose (as a professional blogger) than for SEO gain and I imagine it works well for him.
PSDTuts
Fellow 9rulers PSDTuts is purely informational and offering opportunities for people to interact with the site.
WebDesignerWall
One of the most aesthetically pleasing sites I know, WDW also use a fat footer in a conventional "blog" way; summarising recent posts, recent comments and information about the blog itself. Footers like these are an excellent way to encourage users who have just finished reading content to continue interacting with the site.
Waitrose
Waitrose implement a navigational style footer which doubles up as an SEO enhancer. It allows users to find what they need quickly and effectively with deep-links to the respective sections to ensure search-engine spiders can index the site efficiently.
Break
Online humour-video vendor Break uses a fairly simple yet effective fat-footer linking to other sites within the same network, popular tags and the obvious "about, contact, advertising etc" set of links you'll find in most footers.
Last.fm
A site I consider to be one of the greatest on the Internet has a footer that encourages more interactivity from the user. It lists places where they can continue to get involved (join groups etc), download and use more widgets, get help or see information about Last.fm themselves.
Due to the effectiveness of fat-footers on these high profile sites we're not seeing more and more blogs using them to good effect. I use them here on Seopher.com but also on Distro-review.com too. They're a great way of enticing readers who have just finished reading a post to read something else or interact in a different way.
Think I've missed something sexier than these? Shout at me in the comments.
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