So why buck the system and spice up your footer design? Well, many designer are looking to the footer of the website as valuable real estate to put information that’s not quite top content, but definitely “important”. I have noticed that this trend of creative footer design is especially prominent in the blogging community. With all of the tools available to bloggers from social networking and bookmarking you often struggle to find places to make everything fit and make it look good. Many bloggers are using the footer to place elements like their Twitter updates, FLIKR photos, blog archives, recent comments, latest posts and other elements that are generally left for the sidebar.

I’ve been working on a project for a client that will incorporate a more creative footer design, and eventually when I have time to design version two of GrandmasterB.com; I will be concentrating a lot more time on a creative footer design for the site. I have compiled a list of 26 website designs with stunning and creative footer designs to show you what you can do with your footer. In looking at these sites and their designs, they bring a sense of completion to the site. The entire layout ties the design together and makes for a creative and killer site design.  Each of these designs have a unique and creative approach to utilizing the footer as a place to showcase a number of items. Check them out, comment and let me know what you think.

26 Creative Approaches to Footer Design Gallery

CSS-Tricks

Carsonified – Events

Edgepoint Church

Spoon Graphics

Seed Hunter

Amuki

Komodo Media

Blup

Wire Roses

Boagworld

Drawn to Pixels

Incubus

David Hellman

Flyin’ Web

Ten Thousand Things

Web Designer Wall

National Mechanics

Sam Rayner

CSSAddict

Veerle’s Blog

Tennessee Vacation

Matt Brett

Fling Media

StrawPoll

Legendary Aircraft

I Primi Dieci

Over the weekend, I put the finishing touches on another custom WordPress theme by The BlogFixers. Jeff and I were commissioned by Matt from YepYep to do a complete overhaul of his existing site and create a new theme from the ground up. We worked with Matt throughout the entire process from the brainstorming phase (how many columns, column widths, etc), through the design phase with Photoshop comps and finally the finished product which went live yesterday. The cool thing about this project is this was my first attempt at developing a three column WordPress theme. While I worked on the design with Matt, Jeff worked on getting his server configurations tweaked and dealt with some issues that Matt was having with the WP Super-Cache plugin.

Upgrades and Improvements

As I already stated the new theme is three columns now, as opposed to the previous theme which had only two columns. When designing the new header section I wanted to give the logo a little more flare, so I decided to place it at a bit of an angle and added in some gradient effects. The background behind the logo got a bit of a treatment as well with the addition of a few carefully placed graphic elements. Moving down we created a navigation bar with buttons for the many featured categories of the site. Previously, Matt didn’t have any navigation…this was a big improvement.

I decided to carry of the new look of the logo into other elements like the date badge and the RSS icon. Matt had specifically requested a graphic solution to the date badges after seeing the ones that I created for Cuzoogle’s new theme. The major difference with this version is that we have included the year below the date. Matt had a great idea for displaying the categories as a ‘tag cloud’, so we used the Category Cloud Widget from Lee Kelleher.

Looking Back at the Project

Although, the project took a little longer than anticipate to complete (thank you Holiday Season); Matt was extremely patient and easy to work with through the entire process. We have already received numerous feedback emails regarding the design, and we really appreciate the comments. This was a fun project to work on and I can’t wait to get rolling on the next one.

I really hate to admit it, but I need to buy a cheap PC for testing. No matter how great everything looks in Firefox or Safari…it always needs tweaking in Internet Explorer. We had some CSS issues with the footer not staying put on the YepYep theme in Internet Explorer, but after an hour of messing around I got it fixed.

Thank you Matt for trusting Jeff and I with the redesign of YepYep…we had a blast!

~ GrandmasterB

If you’re getting tired of that free WordPress theme you’ve been sporting, or want to migrate from Blogger to Wordpress; check out the Design Services page to see my portfolio.

Download: RSS-Feed-Icons_Grunge.zip (136 KB)

If you have any suggestions for future freebies, or would like to request a custom design of your own shoot me an email and I will get back to you ASAP! I have opened the doors to the GrandmasterB design center and I am now taking on new design projects. Whether you are looking for custom banner ad design, print or web design…GrandmasterB can do the job. Check out the new Design Services page and see the services I am offering.

~ GrandmasterB