Large footer full of links, is it good?

Question

I see really large footers on some popular sites with a lot of internal navigational links in them.

Are there usability studies or at least authoritative opinions on this topic?

Should I use large navigational footers in my future projects?

Answer 1

I honestly like the footer loaded with links both as a site user and site developer.

When you have a web site, there are always a whole bunch of pages you have to make that are difficult to categorize, and are used relatively rarely. Despite this, they are all very important pages that must exist. Good examples of these pages are the FAQ, the privacy policy, the contact information page, the terms of service, the credits/copyright information page, etc.

When you're making a site you want the navigation at the top to be all about the primary use of the site. If you stick links to these miscellaneous pages up on top, it makes a clutter. If you try to categorize them and put them on a separate page, it will frustrate the users who do actually try to find those pages. Also, regardless of any actual usability studies, Having links to these pages in the primary nav is aesthetically bad, in my opinion.

I would say that Digg and newegg.com are examples of good use of the footer link blocks. The top navigation of Digg is all about digging, logging in, joining, searching, and just one link for "About". The top of Newegg is all about finding and buying products. All the extra stuff is down in a cluster of links in the footer. By putting those links in the footer of every page, you make them accessible, easy to find, but not intrusive to the primary experience of the site.

There might be a better way of handling all those pages that is better, but many popular sites are following this pattern. I think it is safe to assume that users are getting used to the footer links, or maybe they even expect them. If so, then there are definite advantages to following the same design.

Answer 2

• If you have javascript generated menus then it's good to have for search engines so they can index your site better
• It's nice to have for mobiles if you don't have a mobile optimized version of your site/pages.
• You can CTRL+F search the page for specific links that might be hard to find via cascading menus.
• Vision impaired users can navigate easier from the footer style menu
• Users typically scan/read web sites from top to bottom. If they don't immediately find what they're looking for they end at the bottom of your page so it can be nice to have a set of navigation links to avoid scrolling back to the top and scanning the whole page again.