When it comes to designing your website, often the focus is on the header, the navigation menu, and the layout. However, one crucial element that is often overlooked is the footer. Despite residing at the bottom of every page, website footers play a pivotal role in enhancing user experience, providing essential information, and even contributing to SEO efforts for appearing in web searches.
In this article, we delve into the often under-valued world of your website footers, exploring how they are designed and where that information comes from. Whether you're a seasoned web designer or just starting out, you'll learn that the power of a well-crafted footer can elevate your website's overall effectiveness and user satisfaction.
Sections of Your Website Footer
Here at ChurchSpring, we recommend that your website footer contains four main sections for essential navigation and information. If you use a different website builder, your footer may have similar sections; otherwise, reach out to your provider to learn how you can add these important sections.
- "Contact Us" allows easy communication
- "Sitemap" organizes site content for smooth navigation
- "Blog/Updates" keeps visitors informed
- "Events" showcases upcoming activities.
Together, these sections enhance user experience and aid in the search engine optimization (SEO) work that helps make your site appear in Google searches.
Let's dive into to each of these to understand each one in better detail.
Contact Us
The Contact us section of your footer is a fairly important section for basic information for people to know how to contact you and how to find your church!
It should include a phone number and a physical address. When you use ChurchSpring's church website builder, the information that originally populates in this section of the footer is pulling data directly from the settings area of your website.
As you can see here in the photo below, the physical address and the phone number that are placed in the settings area of your ChurchSpring site is what will display in the "Contact Us" section of your footer. If you choose to update this information in the settings area, those changes will be made in the Footer as well!
Sitemap
A website sitemap is like a map that shows all the pages on a website. It helps visitors find what they're looking for quickly and easily by providing a structured overview of the site's content and layout.
With a sitemap, users can navigate through the website more efficiently, improving their overall browsing experience.
Here at ChurchSpring we have also created this sitemap for website admins to be able to easily manage their pages through the "Manage all Pages" feature that appears when an admin is logged into their site.
If you're a ChurchSpring user, learn more about how you can manage your sitemap.
Updates and Blog
The Updates and or Blog section is an area of the footer that provides a concise and easy way for website visitors to find the most recent updates on your site and in your church!
This area is designed to look for any page that you have published on your website that uses the blog template. This area will list these updates or blog entries chronologically and will automatically update each time you post something new, so you don't have to worry about updating the footer.
Events
The last section in your website footer is the Events section. Any event page that you put on your website will feed directly into this section and list those events in chronological order.
One important thing to note is that the titles displayed in the footer are pulled directly from the Event Title that is added to each individual event. When creating a new event, keep the event title concise so the title will display well on the home page, the footer section, and for search engine results. Again, like ChurchSpring's blog or updates section, anywhere you use an events template, the footer section will pull those events into the footer automatically.
Placing Your Best Foot Forward With Your Website Footer
Website footers may not the most exciting part of web design, but they do play a large part in keeping your website accessible and well organized. When your website goes through the ranking for web search results, known as SEO, it is important to have a well designed and consistent footer.
Here at ChurchSpring, it is our goal to make your website design and details such as SEO, as user friendly as we can. Your website footer is just another example of how ChurchSpring is continuing to look to creating the best solutions to serve the church.
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